Titian, Cranach and rivals in art: all the appointments of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – World
Tiziano Vecellio, Woman in furC. 1535, Oil on canvas, 63.7 x 95.5 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Pinacoteca © KHM-Museumsverband
In the autumn of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – which recently celebrated its 130th birthday – there is space for an original exhibition entitled Idols and rivals, a path that, from 20 September to 8 January 2023, will bring together exceptional works from the Viennese museum and a selection of around 70 masterpieces from international collections that will explore this complex and fascinating subject.
The artists not only competed with each other, but measured themselves against famous historical models, and sometimes even their patrons wrote in competition with each other through the commissions entrusted to the most illustrious brush.
The competition between artists for prestigious grabs sometimes degenerated into a climate of aggression, jealousy and hatred that saw the masters delight in intrigues or even become victims of poisoning.
Yet there was no lack of projects resulting from the collaboration between the painters themselves. The exhibition examines numerous artistic comparisons of classical antiquity, the Renaissance and the Baroque, bringing together and combining for the first time works created specifically to compete with each other. From Michelangelo to Dürer, from Titian to Sofonisba Anguissola, from Lavinia Fontana to Cellini and Rubens again, the exhibition will examine and re-propose some of the many artistic comparisons in the history of art, from classical antiquity to 1800, revealing paintings that have never been exhibited in the city first in Austria.
Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment (The Little Fur), 1636-1638, Oil on panel, 86.2 x 178.7 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Pinacoteca © KHM-Museumsverband
Meanwhile, while waiting to see the most illustrious artists of all time challenge each other in its rooms, the Kunsthistorisches invites you to browse through some appointments already in progress.
In fact, it has opened its doors for a few days Wild Cranach, the first exhibition that explores the artistic beginnings of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), born from the collaboration between the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and the Oskar Reinhart “Am Romerholz” Collection in Winterthur. Originally from Franconia, the German Renaissance painter and engraver, one of the highest interpreters of the Danube school and the Lutheran Reformation in art, produced his first existing works in Vienna, arriving in the city around 1500.
These works were celebrated for their expressive power, radically different from the courteous-elegant way that the artist would adopt shortly after, once he became court painter to the Elector of Saxony. We know of only ten works made during the time spent in the city and most of these are exhibited in the exhibition. The double portrait of the Cuspinians (who for the first time will be leaving the Oskar Reinhardt collection in Winterthur) and Penance of St. Jerome (the latter in the Viennese collection and generally considered Cranach’s earliest existing dated painting) will be shown together in the city in which they were painted, along with loans from the Albertina, the Picture Gallery, the Berlin State Museums.
Installation of the exhibition Cranach the Wild | © KHM-Museumsverband
After the exhibition Titian’s women: Beauty, Love, Poetry, who saw Titian’s jewels in dialogue with the painters who inspired and were inspired by them, from Giorgione to Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, until October 16 Point of view # 25 will present an in-depth study of a religious painting by the painter from Pieve di Cadore present in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Scholars of the Viennese museum, which houses the largest collection in the world of works by the Venetian painter, second only to the Prado in Madrid, are increasingly convinced of this. The work, which until recently received little attention from researchers and was attributed to the artist’s workshop, was allegedly made by Titian. The Christ with the globe – also known as Salvatore Mundi – it was long considered a workshop job. In this representation, the Christ with the globe, which gives the work its title, differs from traditional iconography. The absence of a globe, replaced by the master by a simple transparent glass sphere, and the absence of the typical manota as a sign of a gesture of blessing, unmistakable traits of the traditional iconography of the Salvator Mundi, raises the index of a personal interpretation of part of the painter. Furthermore, the Hebrew inscription on the robe of Jesus would suggest that the work was commissioned by a patron to the ideas of the Christian kabbalists.
But there is more. The analyzes on the work through X-rays and infrared images have returned an underlying painting with a Madonna and Child, an image very similar to Titian’s early works depicting the same subject.
Tiziano Vecellio, Christ with the globe, 1520-1530 © KHM-Museumsverband
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• Tiziano, Klimt and Modigliani soon in Vienna in a year of exhibitions