The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture
Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture is the first major exhibition (21.02.2019 - 02.06.2019) in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni . A painter of portraits and religious subjects, Moroni is celebrated as an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting that includes Leonardo da Vinci, the Carracci, and Caravaggio. This exhibition, to be shown exclusively at The Frick Collection in the winter and spring of 2019, brings to light the innovation of the artist whose role in a larger history of European portraiture has yet to be fully explored. His famous Tailor (National Gallery, London), for example, anticipates by many decades the “narrative” portraits of Rembrandt. Likewise, his Pace Rivola Spini (Fondazione Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), arguably the first independent full-length portrait of a standing woman produced in Italy, prefigures the many women that Van Dyck would paint in this format in the following century. The Frick will present some twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects—jewelry, textile, armor, and other luxury items—that evoke the material world of the artist and his sitters. Assembled from international private and public collections such as the National Gallery (London), the Accademia Carrara (Bergamo), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the paintings and objects will bring to life a Renaissance society—from aristocrats to artists to tradesmen—at the crossroads of the Venetian Republic and Spanish-ruled Milan. (Text: Frick Collection)