Displaying items by tag: renaissance

Some of the finest works by one of the best draftsman are now on show in the Louvre.

A total of 66 drawings by Parmigianino (1503-1540), a great master of the Italian High Renaissance, from the museum’s collection are being showcased in two large rooms on the second floor of Aile Denon.

Earlier this month at Sotheby’s London, the Louvre paid £965,000 ($1.44 million) for a Betrayal of Christ, the left wing of a French renaissance triptych by Dreux Bude Master (probably André d’Ypres). The larger central panel, a Crucifixion (below) has been in the Getty Museum since 1979, and the right panel is in the Musée Fabre. The three panels were briefly displayed together at the Art Institute of Chicago for a 2011 exhibition.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston will be the sole venue for the first ever monographic exhibition dedicated to Carlo Crivelli in the United States. Titled, Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice, the exhibition opens Oct. 22 and runs through Jan. 25, 2016.

Carlo Crivelli (about 1435–about 1495) is one of the most important – and historically neglected – artists of the Italian Renaissance. Distinguished by radically expressive compositions, luxuriant ornamental display, and bravura illusionism, his works push the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

Andrew Butterfield, an art dealer and Renaissance scholar, had seen the two-and-a-half-foot tall wooden sculpture several years before, in a photograph, and thought it was “really fantastic.”

“It felt so much like the embodiment of the early Renaissance,” he said recently. He passed on making an offer then. But the gilded figure of a plump, graceful cherub, or putto, nagged at him, and when he finally did buy it, in 2012, it set him off down an art-historical detective trail that made him glad he followed his instincts. Mr. Butterfield and several other experts he has enlisted now believe the statue is a lost work by Donatello, one of the defining artists of the Renaissance, and a rare example of the artist’s work in wood, making the discovery not only a major addition to Donatello’s surviving corpus but also to the history of Western sculpture.

The Boston College branch of the Green Line brings you to this handsome campus, site of the McMullen Museum of Art, whose new exhibition, “ John La Farge and the Recovery of the Sacred,” is definitely worth the pleasant trolley ride or even a journey from farther afield.

At the turn of the 20th century, La Farge (1835-1910) was a pre-eminent American artist, a leader of the American Renaissance movement shaping art, architecture and culture here. As a muralist and decorative painter, he collaborated on private, public and ecclesiastical projects with such leading architects as Henry Hobson Richardson and Stanford White.

The Renaissance sculptures in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, including the replica of Michelangelo’s David, will soon have a shiny new neighbor: Jeff Koons’s Pluto and Proserpina (2010-13). The 11ft work in gold-colored stainless steel will stand in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall and civic museum, from September 25 until December 28. Inside, Koons’s Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun) (2013), from his series of plaster casts of Greco-Roman sculptures, will be presented in the Hall of Lilies, where Donatello’s original bronze Judith and Holofernes (around 1457-64) is on permanent display.

A 12-year-old boy had the worst museum visit ever this past Sunday, at Taipei's Huashan 1914 Creative Park. The boy tripped and punched a Paolo Porpora painting valued at $1.5 million as he was trying to keep his balance.

According to Focus Taiwan, the boy was with a guided tour group visiting the exhibition "The Face of Leonardo, Images of a Genius," which gathers 55 paintings by key artists starting from the Italian Renaissance and going up to the 20th century.

From the Belvedere in the Vatican to Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italian gardens are imbued with Renaissance traditions, bending nature to create works of art.

For its latest High Jewelry collection, Bulgari found inspiration in the geometric precision and architectural complexity of these gardens to bring out their most evocative elements using precious stones.

A painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder fetched 9.3 million pounds ($14.3 million) at Sotheby’s in London, an auction record for the German Renaissance artist.

The sale of the Cranach and other works tallied 39.3 million pounds, toward the lower end of the presale estimate. Wednesday’s result represented a 42 percent drop from an equivalent auction a year ago, when 68.3 million pounds worth of Old Master and British paintings were sold. Of 57 lots offered, 20 failed to find buyers, while auction records were set for five artists.

An oceanfront Tuscan villa that was once home to Leonardo da Vinci is on the market for just $14.6 million, and includes walls designed by the Renaissance master in 1502 while he was working as a military engineer. A few years later, he would paint the Mona Lisa, between 1503 and 1506.

Built in the 1400s as a fort, the four-story, five-bedroom estate is in the town of Livorno, about 15 miles from Pisa and 55 miles from Florence.