Future Italian Exhibitions

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting
National Gallery of Art, Washington
June 18, 2006-September 17, 2006

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
October 7, 2006-January 7, 2007

Regarded as a golden age, 16th-century Venetian art has been the subject of several international loan exhibitions, most recently in London, Paris, Rome, and Venice itself. This new exhibition will differ in important ways from the previous surveys, exploring the relationships between the artists and focusing on paintings from the first three decades of the century, which correspond roughly to the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence. The time span covered by the exhibition represents, visually and intellectually, the most exciting phase of the Renaissance in Venice, when the old Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516), Giorgione (d.1510), and the young Titian, among others, were all working side by side. The exhibition will present approximately 60 paintings that best exemplify the new ideas and ideals, and it will investigate how the innovations they incorporate were developed in other superlative works from the same period. It will include Bellini and Titian’s The Feast of the Gods (1514/1529), Giorgione’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (1505/1510), Laura (c. 1506) and The Three Philosophers (1508/1509).

Visiting Venice in 1506, Dürer could describe the 70-year-old Bellini as “still the best,” but among the younger generation, Giorgione played the central role. Working for a new class of culturally sophisticated patrons, Giorgione invented not just a new style but a new type of painting, which aimed to rival poetry in its evocative power. Giorgione died tragically at an early age, and it was the slightly younger Titian who went on to virtually reinvent the art of painting in ways that have continued to the present day. By 1518 Titian was recognized as Bellini’s successor and as the leading painter in the city. The dominant narrative of early 16th-century Venetian painting stresses Titian’s rise to greatness, but the exhibition will also feature the achievements of two brilliantly gifted young masters, Sebastiano del Piombo (active in Venice until 1511) and Palma Vecchio (d. 1528), who at this time worked nearly as Titian’s equals. While celebrating the achievements of Bellini and his most famous pupils, the show will not omit more conservative masters, like Cima da Conegliano (d. 1517/18) and Vincenzo Catena (d. 1531), and it will include other artists, such as Lorenzo Lotto, who worked in Venice during this period.

The exhibition curators are David Alan Brown, curator of Italian paintings at the National Gallery of Art, and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, curator of Italian Renaissance paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. They are assisted by a committee of specialists of Venetian Renaissance art who will write the essays and entries for the fully illustrated catalogue, which will be published in both English and German.

Desiderio da Settignano
Musée du Louvre, Paris
December 2006-February 2007

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
March-May 2007

National Gallery of Art, Washington
July 1, 2007-September 30, 2007

Desiderio da Settignano (c. 1429 -1464) was one of the greatest sculptors of the Italian Renaissance and one of the finest stonecarvers of all time. Trained in Florence, probably by Donatello, he died young, and very few works by him exist. This exhibition will bring together approximately 25 works, including his tender busts of children–two of which are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art—his extraordinary low reliefs— the most remarkable of which is St. Jerome—his groups of the Virgin and Child, and his delicate portraits of women.

The exhibition catalogue, the first book on Desiderio since 1962 and the first ever published in English, will include illustrated essays on two masterpieces that cannot leave the Florentine churches for which they were made: the tomb of the Florentine chancellor Carlo Marsuppini in Santa Croce (c. 1453-1460) and the sacrament tabernacle in the Medici church of San Lorenzo (c. 1460-1464).

The exhibition will be organized at the National Gallery of Art by Nicholas Penny, Senior Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts.

General Information

The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, and are open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on December 25 and January 1. For information call (202) 737-4215 or the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf (TDD) at (202) 842-6176, or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov.

Visitors will be asked to present all carried items for inspection upon entering the East and West Buildings. Checkrooms are free of charge and located at each entrance. Luggage and other oversized bags must be presented at the 4th Street entrances to the East or West Building to permit x-ray screening and must be deposited in the checkrooms at those entrances. For the safety of visitors and the works of art, nothing may be carried into the Gallery on a visitor's back. Any bag or other items that cannot be carried reasonably and safely in some other manner must be left in the checkrooms. Items larger than 17 x 26 inches cannot be accepted by the Gallery or its checkrooms.

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