From Botticelli to Titian
28 October 2009 – 14 February 2010
Budapest
Museum of fine Arts
Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art
A significant number of the paintings, drawings, graphics, sculptures and antiquities preserved in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts originate from Italy. More than one third of the Old Masters collection alone, comprising over one thousand items, are works by Italian masters, so we are justified in claiming that the museum is one of the most important venues of Italian culture in Hungary. We wish to organise an exhibition showing a wide spectrum of Italian art. The masterpieces, borrowed mainly from Italian collections, will enable visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts to augment their knowledge about Italian painting based on the local collection. A prominent place will be reserved at the exhibition for works by those great innovators who are not represented in the museum’s otherwise rich collection which fully documents individual schools and tendencies.
We plan to include more than 110 works at the exhibition of Italian Renaissance painting, of which 30 would come from the museum’s own collection while the majority of the remaining 80 would be borrowed from Italian museums. Other borrowing partners will be such prominent European museums as the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
In the recent past there were two exhibitions in Hungary that provided a comprehensive picture of the painting of a nation through its masterpieces. The exhibition entitled El Greco, Velázquez, Goya. Masterpieces of Five Centuries of Spanish Painting was staged by the museum in spring 2006. Works were borrowed from several German museums and in addition from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Prado in Madrid. With its over 200,000 visitors the exhibition was the ninth most frequented one displaying works in the world in 2006 by the old masters. At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 another similar exhibition had been hosted by the Műcsarnok, bearing the title Light and Shade – Masterpieces, 400 Years of French Painting. This exhibition attracted 300,000 visitors to our partner institution. Such large-scale, comprehensive exhibitions enjoy success worldwide: for example, the Guggenheim Museum’s From El Greco to Picasso enjoyed enormous success in New York last year.
It is our firm belief that Hungary will pay off a national debt with this Italian exhibition. It is our utmost desire that we strengthen not only reverence in the Hungarian public for the glorious past of Italian art, but also love. The various schools and stylistic trends will be duly represented at this exhibition, and several works by the most famous Italian geniuses will be on display.
2009-09-16 09:48:21
