The exhibition Dürer and Italy opens on March 10 and will run till June 10, 2007 at
the Scuderie del Quirinale. Curated by Kristina Herrmann Fiore, the exhibition is
presented by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the Office for Cultural Policies of the
City of Rome and the Ministry for Culture, Entertainment and Sport of the regional
government of Lazio, in collaboration with the Office of the Special Superintendent
for the Florentine Polo Museale, the Uffizi Gallery and the Uffizi Department of
Drawings and Prints in Florence, and the Office of the Special Superintendent for the
Roman Polo Museale, co-presented with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo and
sponsored by Acea,
It is an event that will provide the public with an opportunity to get to know the art of
Albrecht Dürer more intimately, experiencing him not just as a master of woodcut
prints but also as a brilliant painter, watercolorist and drawer. In fact, this will be the
first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to this ingenious Renaissance artist.
As part of the exhibition, over 20 original paintings by Dürer, 10 watercolors, 33
drawings, 58 original prints and 3 paintings of disputed attribution will be on display,
alongside other works by Italian artists making a total of more than 200 works.
The exhibition aims to explore the relationship between the genius from Nuremberg
and Italian art, within the overall theme of reciprocal influences, since, as the curator
Kristina Herrmann Fiore writes: «On the one hand, artistic theories and Italian art
contributed in a fundamental way to the development of the specificity of Dürer's
style, while on the other, through the spread of his famous prints and publications, he
offered artists of the 16th and 17th centuries a rich vein of inspiration, becoming one
of the pillars of Italian figurative culture».
From the works displayed, it will be possible, on the one hand, to observe how much
Dürer reflected on great Italian art and how much of it he absorbed, while on the
other, to trace his influence on artists such as Pontormo, Raphael, the Carracci
brothers and Caravaggio and his followers including Domenico Fetti and Carlo
Maratta.
The first floor of the Scuderie will be dedicated to the theme of the influence on the
art of Dürer of Italian artists such as Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo, Agostino da Lodi,
Jacopo de' Barbari and others, with works displayed over five rooms and arranged
according to the following topics: "The art of portraiture"; "The discovery of the
human figure through classical art"; "The study of nature, plants, animals and
landscape"; "Religious painting"; and "The works of Emperor Maximilian I".
In turn, the second floor will briefly explore the legacy of Dürer through the display
of few illustrative works.
Once again, as Herrmann Fiore writes: «Through the spread of his prints throughout
Europe and beyond, the work of Dürer became a rich source of inspiration on which
to draw in the most varied of circumstances for artists of the 16th and 17th centuries,
including in Italy, and the exhibition itself enables an understanding of how from the
microcosm of the prints, which are also often quite small, his compositional ingenuity
was able to influence large-format works. This was a generalized phenomenon in
Italy and not limited to Venice, immediately reaching, at the beginning of the 16th
century, even regions as far-flung as Sicily. This theme has never been the subject of
an exhibition before -with the exception of the initiative in Nuremberg which was,
however, dedicated exclusively to the art of engraving».
This exhibition was made possible thanks to collaboration with the Roman and the
Florentine "Polo Museale" and, in particular, with the Uffizi Gallery and the Uffizi
Department of Drawings and Prints in Florence. The latter, in fact, is lending a series
of engravings and drawings by Dürer, which originally belonged to the Medici
family. The Uffizi Gallery has lent a considerable number of works, including the
important "Adoration of the Magi" -an emotionally charged work restored
specifically for the occasion -as well as portraits of Albrecht Dürer the Elder and of
the Apostles James and Philip. Other Dürer masterpieces on display are on loan from
the major German museums, from Vienna, Washington, Madrid and London, as well
as from different Italian collections.
The exhibition is being held under the High Patronage of the President of the Italian
Republic and enjoys the patronage of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of
Germany in Rome.
