Face to face:
Flanders, Florence and Renaissance painting

LOS ANGELES. “Many people think that on January 1, 1400, the sun rose over Florence and the Renaissance began, but this is not the case at all,” says Catherine Hess, chief curator of Huntington Library’s European art - California-based science center, which includes an extensive library, a magnificent art collection and a beautiful botanical garden. Hess, together with art historian Paula Nuttel, carefully studied the Burgundy royal court in Flanders, located in northern Italy, to explore the influence of Flemish artists on the birth and development of the Renaissance. The Huntington Library project “Face to Face: Flanders, Florence and Renaissance Painting” is designed to remind people and emphasize how significant a contribution to the development of the Renaissance was made by Flanders, as well as to study in detail the motives, plots, objects and methods that Italian artists of the 15th century copied from the paintings of their Flemish colleagues.

The painting "The Man of Sorrows Blessing" by Hans Memling (left), painted in 1480-90, and Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1490. Photo: theartnewspaper.com

The exposition, which opens this month in Huntington, will be the first exhibition in the United States to address this issue, and the Science and Education Center in Southern California will be the only venue for the event.

“The impact of Florentine art on Renaissance painting is widely known among Flemish art critics, it is much less recognized by Italian experts and, finally, the general public has no idea about it,” says Catherine Hess, explaining that most of the research on this topic has been published in Dutch language.

There is direct evidence that some Flemish artists taught their Italian collet the technique of writing with oil paints, which made it possible to transfer small details much better than tempera - the traditional technique of painting Italians.

The exhibition, which includes 29 paintings and six manuscripts, is divided into five thematic sections, perfectly illustrating the flow from north to south of special styles, ideas and motifs, including the formation of the diptych as a classic religious object, the evolution of the portrait and the image of Christ as the “Man of Sorrows” ".

The picture of the Flemish artist Hans Memling "Peali’s husband" will be exhibited in a pair with work on the same topic by the Italian Domenico Ghirlandaio, which is unusually similar to the first. Katherine Hess says: “It seems that Ghirlandaio used the Memling painting as a stencil.” And this is just one of many such examples.

One of the highlights of the exhibition will be the reunion of the diptych of the Flemish master Roger van der Weyden “Our Lady with the Baby” from 1460, from Huntington’s vault, with the diptych “Portrait of Philippe de Croix” very similar to it in performance technique, taken on loan from the Royal Museum Fine Arts Antwerp.

“We are still terribly surprised when we find similarities in these two seemingly divided cultures of the 15th century, but apparently we should get used to it,” says Huntington, curator of European art. Catherine Hess is sure that many more analogies can be found. One explanation for these connections could be the enormous influence of the Medici family during the Renaissance. A family of bankers, all of whose members have traditionally been major patrons of art and art lovers, opened a branch in Bruges in 1430. “The perception of a world with very permeable boundaries is considered normal, and this exposure is evidence of this,” she says.

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru