Saturday 10 June 2017

Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities To Open at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at William & Mary in February

WILLIAMSBURG, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One of only two of Botticelli's paintings of an isolated Venus will be

on view for the first time in the United States, together with other

Botticelli mythologies and portraits in Botticelli and the Search

for the Divine: Florentine Painting Between the Medici and

the Bonfires of the Vanities, a major international loan

exhibition organized by the Muscarelle

Museum https://iupat.org/ of Art in Williamsburg, Va., in partnership with Italy's

Associazione Culturale Metamorfosi.





Sandro Botticelli(Florence 1445-1510), was one of the most

original and creative painters of the Italian Renaissance. Together with

his deeply moving religious images, Botticelli is renowned as the

unchallenged master of classical mythologies. In his time, he also

replicated the central figure of his iconic Birth of Venus in the

Uffizi gallery in Florence in paintings with dark backgrounds stripped

bare of place and time, just displaying the solitary beautiful nude. One

of the only two such Venuses known today in the world, from the Galleria

Sabauda museum in Turin, will be on view for the first time in America,

together with many other works that have never previously traveled to

the United States.

The exhibition will travel to the Museum

of Fine Arts Boston as its only other venue. The exhibition will

open at the Muscarelle Museum on February 11, 2017 and run through April

6. The exhibition will open to the public in Boston on April 18 and will

close on July 9.

"We are extremely proud to be able to bring to this country a

groundbreaking exhibition of one of the world's greatest artists," said

Aaron De Groft, director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art. "The

Botticelli show continues a tradition of internationally important

exhibitions, following Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Leonardo da Vinci

in recent years, in which exhibitions of great original works of art

provide the lens for us to explore the themes and ideas that inspired

their genius."

Renato Miracco, cultural attach for the Italian Embassy in Washington,

D.C. has stated that the upcoming Botticelli and the Search for the

Divine "will be the largest and most important exhibition of its

type ever organized in the United States."

The restless, prolific and original genius of Sandro Botticelli will be

explored in depth in this historic exhibition, which features sixteen of

his paintings, most with life-size figures, from major museums and

churches in six Italian cities, including Florence, Milan and Venice.

Every phase of the artist's long, tumultuous career is represented in

the selection, by far the largest Botticelli exhibition ever staged in

the United States.

Also featured are six rare paintings by Botticelli's great master

Filippo Lippi, the only pupil of Masaccio. The cultural milieu of

Renaissance Florence will be represented by several paintings by

Filippo's son, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli's most important student and

a leading master in his own right, a painting and a bronze statuette of

Hercules by Antonio Pollaiuolo, the death mask of Lorenzo the

Magnificent, and a portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.

The Muscarelle Museum of Art is located on the campus of William

& Mary at 603 Jamestown Rd in Williamsburg, Va. For more

information, call 757-221-2700 or visit muscarelle.org.

Admission is $15 during this exhibition.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161014005335/en/Botticelli-Search-Divine-Florentine-Painting-Medici-Bonfires

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