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EXHIBITION: Die Kunst der Beschreibung – Handschriften aus fünf Jahrhunderten kommentiert von Eberhard König, Freie Universität Berlin, University Library (Garystr. 39, 14195 Berlin), 8 June 2012 – 27 July 2012.

Aller Anfang der Kunstbetrachtung ist Beschreibung. Die Erkenntnis, dass eine gelungene Beschreibung nicht nur vorbereitende Übung, sondern ein Mittel rhetorischer Überzeugungskunst ist, wurzelt in der antiken Kunst der Ekphrasis. Nach dem Verständnis Nikolaus von Myras setzt die genaue Wahrnehmung Kennerschaft voraus; über Künstler, Ikonographie und Bildtraditionen sowie die Herkunft, Entstehung und Beschaffenheit des Werks, die in die Beschreibung einfließt. Entscheidend für deren Erfolg ist die sprachliche Anschaulichkeit, durch die der Zuhörer – selbst Schauender – ein zweites Mal, bereichert durch die vermittelte Wahrnehmung des Redners, zum Zuschauer wird.

Die Ausstellung Die Kunst der Beschreibung – Handschriften aus fünf Jahrhunderten kommentiert von Eberhard König präsentiert 44 Faksimiles von Handschriften, die Eberhard König im Laufe seiner über dreißigjährigen Beschäftigung mit der Buchmalerei des Mittelalters und der Renaissance kommentiert und – nicht selten in Zusammenarbeit mit Kollegen und Schülern – wissenschaftlich bearbeitet hat und die auf diese Weise oft zum ersten Mal einem größeren Publikum zugänglich gemacht werden konnten. Die anschauliche Beschreibung der Miniaturen, des Dekors und immer wieder auch der Texte und der Beziehung zwischen Bild und Text, ist fast immer das Herzstück des Kommentars. Ganz im Sinne der Ekphrasis gewinnt der Autor entscheidende Argumente für die kunsthistorische Verortung und Deutung der Handschriften aus der kenntnisreichen Anschauung.

Die Ausstellung findet statt zum 65. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Eberhard König, der seit 1986 am Kunsthistorischen Institut der Freien Universität Berlin lehrt, und ist Bestandteil des Colloquiums “Traditionen neu erfinden – Zum Vorlagentransfer in der Buchmalerei des Spätmittelalters”. Beide Veranstaltun- gen werden von seinen engsten Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern organisiert.

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EXHIBITION: Perugino: Raphael’s Master, München, Alte Pinakothek, (Barer Straße 27, Eingang Theresienstraße), 13 October 2011 – 15 January 2012.

Pietro Perugino was one of the most successful artists of the Italian Renaissance around 1500. Prominent patrons courted his attention even some distance from Florence and Perugia, the centres in which he worked. It was not just the classical harmony and technical skill of his paintings that his contemporaries admired, but their contemplative, lyrical mood in particular.

In 1829, King Ludwig I of Bavaria managed to acquire one of the master’s principal works, The Vision of Saint Bernard, for the Alte Pinakothek. This altarpiece is an invitation to rid Perugino of the shadow cast by his pupil Raphael. The Munich exhibition is the first major show outside Italy to be devoted entirely to Perugino. It comprises 40 exquisite paintings on loan from international collections (including the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre and the Hermitage), focussing in particular on the heyday of the artist’s career. Apart from the impressive religious works, unique examples of Perugino’s skill as a portraitist and of his mythological creations vividly illustrate the humanist ideals of the times.

A detailed catalogue, edited by Andreas Schumacher, is being published for the exhibition with contributions by Matteo Burioni, Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen, Annette Hojer, Oliver Kase, Jens Niebaum and Andreas Schumacher.

Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2011, 304 pages, 193 illustrations. Price: €29,90 (in the museum shop), €39,80 (trade edition).

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EXHIBITION: Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500, London, The National Gallery (Sainsbury Wing), 6 July – 2 October 2011. Admission free. Catalogue by Scott Nethersole.

As part of a programme of summer shows focusing on the National Gallery’s collection, Devotion by Design explores the function, the original location, and the development of altarpieces in Italy during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

These objects furnished altars in churches and were not originally intended to hang in a gallery as we see them today. Instead, they were created for a specific sacred context, forming the focus of devotion for worshippers.

Using the Gallery’s own collection, this exhibition investigates the development of altarpieces, looking at changes in form, style and type. It examines not only the evolution of their physical structure but also their relationship to their frames and to the monumental architecture that surrounded them.

A small section of Devotion by Design will be dedicated to altarpiece fragments, explaining the role different elements of altarpieces played in the overall ensemble. The exhibition examines the reasons why altarpieces came to be dismembered (often with the dissolution of religious institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries) and the methods that art historians now use to reassemble them.

Devotion by Design showcases altarpieces by well-known artists such as Piero della Francesca, but includes many which are less familiar. It revisits works in the National Gallery Collection in a fresh and innovative light, drawing on the wealth of scholarship undertaken in this field in recent years.

The exhibition has been reviewed by PETER HUMPHREY in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CLIII, n. 1303, October 2011, pp. 684-685.

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EXHIBITION: Dressing Up and Dressing Down in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Costume in Art.  Se vêtir au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, Les Enluminures, Le Louvre des Antiquaires, (2 Place du Palais-Royal, 75001 Paris, tel +331-42601558), 5 May – 25 August 2011. Contact: info@lesenluminures.com

This summer spotlights the theme of Fashion worldwide. As part of its series of 20th year anniversary celebrations, the gallery Les Enluminures plans an exhibition on fashion in its Paris space in the Louvre des Antiquaires. Approximately 35 works of art are featured in Dressing Up and Dressing Down in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Costume in Art, from May 5 to August 25.

The exhibition will include manuscripts, single leaves and cuttings and sculpture. Dressing Up and Dressing Down is coordinated with two museum exhibitions that take place at the same time. One is at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and is titled Illuminating Fashion. It also opens in May and continues through the summer months and is accompanied by a long-awaited publication by Roger Wieck and Ann van Buren. At the Getty Museum, Fashion in the Middle Ages, is displayed simultaneously from May 31 to August 21. It is accompanied by a Getty Publication by Margaret Scott.

The exhibition is organized around three themes. The first takes the title of the exhibition and shows how in many diverse ways people in the Middle Ages dressed their parts. It was so important to dress according to one’s station in life and occupation that the fifteenth-century proto-feminist writer, Christine de Pizan, complained that she often saw her contemporaries dressing above their social class. Thus, the nobility favored lavish houppelands (gowns) and surcotes (overcoats or tunics), often fur-lined, usually with miniver (white fur used in ceremonial garments) or squirrel. The peasants wore simpler garments.”

The second theme is “Wearing Color”. Color was frequently a code: blue for royalty, green for hope and youth, red and green together signified bold youth, and so forth. Stripes were to be strictly avoided: only prisoners, executioners, those people on the margins of society wore stripes. The middle class often wore more sober colors: witness the neutral-colored garment worn by the head of the tailor’s guild in Bologna, along with the scissors (symbol of the guild) in the margin.

The third theme, “Accessorizing Costume”, throws a spotlight on rings and some pendants. At least in Italy sumptuary laws regulated the wearing of gold jewelry, but plenty of silver and even bronze jewelry was available for the lower estates. Merchants wore their rings on the index finger for ease of sealing with them. The numerous paintings of the period in which wealthy sitters wear as many as 8 to 10 rings on a single hand show just how popular this bejeweled accessory had become.

This exhibition, which is the second in a series of four to celebrate our 20th year anniversary, will give to our audience of gallery-goers—composed mostly of European and Americans—a chance to see many works in which fashion figures. Paris is, after all, ‘the fashion capital of the world!’ Those who can’t come to Paris will visit the exhibition virtually—such is the beauty of the Internet.

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EXHIBITION: Fashion in the Middle Ages at The J. Paul Getty Museum (1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA), 31 May – 14 August 2011. Catalogue by Margaret Scott.

Clothes are far more than a physical covering to protect the body from the elements; they can reveal much about a person. An evening gown, a doctor’s white coat, cowboy boots—today these can all be clues to social status, profession, or geographic origin. In the Middle Ages, clothing was integral to identifying one’s place in the world. Medieval people were highly skilled at reading the meaning of fashion, which is reflected throughout the painted pages of illuminated manuscripts. In Philosophy Presenting the Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius, female personifications of philosophy and the seven liberal arts are portrayed in a range of late medieval fashions. Themes in this exhibition range from the extravagant cost of clothing worn by the elite, to styles and fabrics permitted by custom and law, to the nventiveness that embellishes historical depictions of fashion.

Material Wealth
While at times containing fanciful or idealized images of clothing, manuscript illuminations often reflect the actual styles and fabrics of the Middle Ages, as well as the economic factors behind them. For the medieval viewer, color and material provided essential information about the social status of the figures on the page. For example, scholars wore red robes that carried the additional prestige associated with the high cost of crimson dye. Peasants wore cheap, undyed wool in shades of brown and gray. Such distinctions offer valuable insights into the world of fashion, allowing us to imagine what the books’ makers and owners might have been wearing and why. In an image in which he is shown kneeling in prayer, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, wears a fabric of gold thread that, in the 1400s, was usually made by wrapping gilt-silver foil around a core of silk. Gold cloth was the ultimate status symbol in medieval clothing.

Dressing the Part
Manuscript illuminators used costume to help place figures in the strict social hierarchy of the Middle Ages and to identify people by profession. Monks, doctors, lawyers, knights, scholars, queens, and courtiers could all be recognized at a glance by their distinctive clothing. It would be a mistake to regard all illuminations as direct reflections of medieval dress. In chivalric romances, wealthy patrons sought images of a perfect world, populated with glamorous versions of themselves and even peasants that were too well dressed. In an image made by an unknown French illuminator, fashions worn by the courtiers who accompanied the Emperor Sigismund reflect the way that impractical dress conveyed status. According to a law of 1463, short gowns that revealed men’s buttocks were restricted to the upper classes.

Another Time, Another Place
Since medieval manuscripts were often biblical or historical in nature, certain conventions arose for dressing figures from the past. Costumes for Christ and the apostles were based on the late classical garments seen in surviving Roman paintings. Other biblical figures were clothed in whimsical interpretations of the fashions worn in the Middle East and beyond. Jews and Muslims were frequently presented in turbans, fanciful headdresses, and striped fabrics that were associated with contemporary non–Christians as well as people from ancient history. A page from an Armenian Bible shows the Old Testament King David in the bejeweled ceremonial dress of Christian Byzantine emperors who had ruled the eastern portion of the Roman Empire. Although the Byzantine Empire had long ago fallen to the Ottoman Turks, its artistic traditions survived in Persia. King David’s clothing nostalgically links him to the world of Byzantium and the ancient past.

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EXHIBITION – Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese, New York, Museum of Biblical Art (1865 Broadway at 61st Street, New York, NY 10023, phone: 212.408.1500), 11 February – 12 June 2011.

Passion in Venice presents a sacred theme central to the history of Christian Art: Christ as Man of Sorrows.  This devotional image offers the piteous, half-length Savior variously paradoxically standing erect in death, slumped in death and supported by angels, or displaying some pre-resurrection combination of vitality and death.  This portrayal of Christ visualizes Isaiah 53:3: “He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”  Its origins rooted in Byzantium, the figure entered Venetian art in the late Middle Ages after which it flourished locally for centuries, eventually acquiring its own name in dialect, Cristo Passo.  The exhibition will trace the ongoing conventions and artistic permutations of this visual type into modern times.

Drawn from international loans, Passion in Venice examines the rich visual tradition of the sorrowful Christ in Venice through a wide range of representations of the theme across different media, including illuminated manuscripts, paintings, prints, sculpture, and liturgical objects.  The exhibition also will address the issue of how this remarkable theme – the dead Christ beyond space and time – reflected and shaped Venetian piety in the Renaissance and immediately thereafter.

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