Displaying items by tag: Baroque

A long-lost painting by the Spanish Baroque artist Sebastián de Llanos Valdés, which was missing for over 70 years, has been discovered in the UK, after an unidentified individual tried to consign "Penitent Maria Magdalena" to Christie's, according to a DPA report. However, the Staatliche Museum Schwerin, which owns the painting, had previously entered the artwork into Germany's centralized "Lost Art" database for stolen artworks. Since the attempted sale the museum and auction house were able to negotiate the work's return; with the individual who found and consigned the Valdés reportedly being offered a reward by way of compensation.

The artist was born in Seville, and was a pupil of Francisco Herrera the Elder, he worked chiefly for private patrons. In 1660, the artist actively supported Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in founding the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), afterwards making frequent donations of oil and other materials for the students' use.

For the past few weeks, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has been hosting a variety of special events to celebrate its 250th anniversary. Founded in 1764, with an art collection from the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, the Hermitage is one of the oldest and largest museums in the world. The institution’s sprawling collection comprises over three million objects and occupies a complex of historic buildings, including the Baroque Winter Palace, a lavish former residence of Russian emperors.

On Saturday, December 6, the Hermitage projected a colorful 3-D show onto the facade of its General Staff Building, located on St. Petersburg’s popular Palace Embankment. More than half a millions viewers visited the Hermitage to catch a glimpse of the three-hour show, “Dance of History,” which presented a historical overview of the museum.

“Picturing Mary” is the most ambitious exhibition mounted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in years, and given its subject — images of the Virgin Mary — it is likely to be one of its most popular as well. It opens in the middle of the Christmas season, when the subject of Mary is particularly resonant, and it includes more than 60 works, some of them by the most celebrated artists of the Renaissance and baroque eras, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio and Dürer. If this show, which opens Friday, doesn’t fill the museum’s galleries with throngs of visitors, nothing will.

The subject is vast, and doing it justice in one exhibition is impossible. One might organize such a show based on the archetypal narrative moments in Mary’s life — the Annunciation, the Pieta, the Assumption — that have inspired artists for centuries.

To celebrate her 100th birthday, the long-standing benefactor of Frankfurt's Städel Museum, Dagmar Westberg, has donated Jusepe de Ribera's "St. James the Greater" (ca. 1615/16) to the museum's old masters collection. The painting is one of the most valuable and significant works by the Spanish painter.

Ribera (1591-1652) is widely considered as one of the most important 17th century artists. His painting style united aspects of two major European artistic schools. Although Ribera was born in the Spanish province of Valencia, he spent most of his life working in the Italian cities of Rome and Naples. Consequently, he is thought of as not only one of the most influential Spanish artists, but also one of the most important Italian baroque painters.

On Sunday, December 7, a fire swept through the Galerie Canesso, on the rue Laffitte in central Paris, destroying part of its library, documents, and offices. The gallery specializes in Italian Old Master paintings from the Renaissance to the Baroque. The fire was caused by an electrical fault, said Véronique Damian, an art historian who works with the gallery’s founder Maurizio Canesso.

“This was a great loss for us but fortunately no paintings were damaged,” Damian said in a telephone interview.

The Frick Collection has always been rich in Spanish paintings, particularly works by Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. The museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick, bought three canvases by El Greco on his travels to Spain, and they currently hang together as part of “El Greco in New York,” an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death.

But in 1904, before Frick acquired any of these well-known paintings, he bought a self-portrait by the 17th-century Baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

There's something quietly apocalyptic about so dramatic a cultural shift. But the day of reckoning isn't really sensed in "Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s," a new show (through Jan. 4) at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

There's plenty of flash and even some bombast. How could there not be, when artist Julian Schnabel was busily making the epic 1988 painting "Cortes"? A coarse, gashed, 20-foot-wide, olive-drab tarpaulin stained in map-like blotches, it's like a hazy chart for a massive military campaign.

Near the top hangs an embroidered Baroque altar front in royal purple and gold. Even the title, which refers to the Spanish conquistador who demolished the Aztec empire, speaks of feverish ambition.

The long-lost Caravaggio painting that the baroque master had with him when he died in 1610 has finally been identified, according to the world’s foremost authority on the artist.

Several copies of "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" are thought to exist. But now the Caravaggio scholar Mina Gregori has said she is confident of having made a “definitive” verification of the version that she has studied in a private European collection.

Paris’ Picasso Museum will reopen on Saturday, October 25, following a turbulent renovation and expansion. The institution closed in 2009 for what was expected to be a two-year refurbishment, but once underway, the scope of the project expanded. Five years later and $27 million over budget, the renovation is finally complete.

The Picasso Museum, which is housed in a 17th-century Baroque mansion in Paris’ historic Marais quarter, first opened to the public in 1985. The majority of its collection, which features around 5,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, and documents, was left to the French state by the Picasso family after the artist’s death in 1973.

Although Peter Paul Rubens is recognized as one of the baroque period’s greatest artists, no woman wants to be called Rubenesque, a term describing the overly healthy figures that populate his work, like the meaty angel of truth in "The Triumph of Truth Over Heresy," or the round-shouldered women in "The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert." Both are in the Getty’s unique new exhibit, "Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist," through Jan. 11.

Rubens and Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia go all the way back to 1609 when he was appointed court painter for her husband, Albert VII of Austria. Widowed in 1621, Isabel, a devout Catholic, turned to her faith and to Rubens as a confidant, even sending him on diplomatic missions, including spying on the French.