A renaissance at the palace
Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to be invited to a preview of the latest exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace. We were given a brilliantly illuminating tour by the curators and generally hosted warmly by the gallery. You can read my tweets from our Bloggers' Breakfast here, but The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein is such a rich exhibition that I had to wait for a second visit this weekend before writing about it.
It is, I think, an exemplary mix of beautiful art and well-constructed context. You get a sense of how the works fit into the royal collection, and have arrived there over time, as well as where they came from. I love the way that each label tells you when the item arrived in the collection, gifted to or acquired by which monarch and from whom. The exhibition opens with a room introducing the Northern Renaissance and its contexts, using portraits of key Northern Renaissance figures like Erasmus and Pirckheimer. Sections then look at particular artists or regional art styles, thus we meet Dürer and Holbein, as well as art from the Holy Roman Empire, France and the Netherlands. We are given a good sense of how artists, styles and techniques moved around Renaissance Europe. The France section, particularly, gives some sense of interaction with Italy, but I would have liked a more overt discussion of how the Gallery both is and isn't displaying the traditional 'Renaissance.' All visitors to this exhibition should spend the rest of their day in the V&A's Medieval and Renaissance Galleries to get the complementary picture.
It is good, however, to see decorative arts getting a real look in here too, with beautiful gold cups and bronzes featured in the Dürer room, tapestries from the Netherlands, and glowing cabinets of illuminated books, miniatures and armour. There are, in any case, particularly rich representations of contemporary material culture in paintings like The Misers by a follower of Marinus van Reymerswaele. Others have, furthermore, been re-discovered during conservation for the exhibition, with a key appearing in Holbein's Hans of Antwerp. Indeed, the particularly fascinating theme which runs through the show is how many of the works have changed over time. Holbein's portrait drawings feature sitters' names added in the eighteenth century, often inaccurately; Primaticcio's design for a ceiling has been split into two since at least the seventeenth century and only reunited for this exhibition; Charles I had a more interesting background added to a portrait of Erasmus after Holbein. Most striking is Rudolph II's alteration of Brueghel's Massacre of the Innocents, to cover the images of dead children with inoffensive bundles of food or clothes.
The Gallery has decided to keep these alterations as part of the complex history of the painting. Its story is the perfect example of how objects travelled Europe in the Renaissance, acquiring different owners and meanings, and of how that story continues in modern collections in conversation with different scholarly attitudes; a story which is told here through just one complex and beautiful royal collection.