Displaying items by tag: of heaven and earth: 500 years of italian painting from glasgow museums

Bellini. Botticelli. Titian. "Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" celebrates the richness of Italy’s artistic legacy. It features religious paintings of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, along with secular Neoclassical and genre paintings of the nineteenth century—with the principal artistic centers, such as Bologna, Florence, Milan, Naples, Rome, and Venice, represented. Milwaukee is the only Midwest stop on the tour of this rare exhibition.

Opening with some of the earliest and most refined examples of Italian painting, including Sandro Botticelli’s stunning "Annunciation," the exhibition unfolds chronologically.

A traveling exhibition of master paintings by some of the greatest names in European art ends its East Coast summer residency at the Allentown Art Museum on Sunday, September 7. "Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" features works by Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Guardi, Salvator Rosa, and Titian, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these forty major works; after Allentown, the exhibition will travel west to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of the Arts (SOTA), the exhibition is free to all visitors, Wednesday-Saturday 11-4 and Sunday noon-4. “The elimination of our admission fees this summer, and dual-language labels in English and Spanish, are intended to deliver a message that in this, our eightieth anniversary year, the Allentown Art Museum is accessible to all and that we encourage everyone to experience what this extraordinary institution has to offer,” says David Mickenberg, Priscilla Payne Hurd President and CEO of the Art Museum.

Centuries ago, if you wanted to see the paintings of the great Italian masters, you would have embarked on something called The Grand Tour, a kind of traveling educational experience to the principal artistic centers of Renaissance Italy: Rome, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Naples and Venice.

This summer, The Grand Tour, by way of Glasgow, Scotland, is coming to Allentown.

The Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley is one of the stops on an once-in-a-lifetime American tour of paintings by some of the greatest names in Italian art. It's a rare opportunity to see the work of artists that quite literally changed the world. And admission will be free, due to an initiative to make the museum more accessible.