BAROCCI: BRILLIANCE AND GRACE

27 February – 19 May 2013, Supported by The Joseph F McCrindle Foundation, Sainsbury Wing, Admission charge

Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is celebrated as one of the most talented artists of late 16th-century Italy. Fascinated by the human form, he fused charm and compositional harmony with an unparalleled sensitivity to colour.

Thanks to the cooperation of the Soprintendenze delle Marche, the exhibition will showcase Barocci’s most spectacular Marchigian altarpieces, including his famous Entombment from Senigallia [above]

and Last Supper from Urbino Cathedral – never before seen outside Italy. In total, 16 of his most important altarpieces and devotional paintings and five of his finest portraits will be on display alongside their preparatory drawings and oil sketches.

Barocci was an incessant and even obsessive draughtsman, preparing every composition with prolific studies in every conceivable medium. Drawing from life and inspired by the people and animals that surrounded him, his works are characterised by a warmth and humanity that transform his religious subjects into themes with which all can identify.

VERMEER AND MUSIC: 

LOVE AND LEISURE IN THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE * 

26 June – 8 September 2013, Sainsbury Wing, Admission free

This exhibition explores the concept of music as a pastime of the elite in the northern Netherlands during the 17th century. 

Vermeer and Music: Love and Leisure in the Dutch Golden Age will bring together for the first time the National Gallery’s two paintings by Vermeer, Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, and Vermeer’s Guitar Player, on exceptional loan from the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House. The exhibition aims to enhance viewers’ appreciation of these beautiful and evocative paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries by juxtaposing them with musical instruments and songbooks of the period. Visitors will be able to compare 17th-century virginals, guitars, lutes and other instruments with their painted representations to judge the accuracy of representation and what liberties the painter might have taken to enhance the visual or symbolic appeal of his work.  In 17th- century Dutch paintings, music often figured as a metaphor for harmony, a symbol of transience or, depending on the type of music being performed, an indicator of one’s education and position in society. Musical instruments and songbooks were also included as attributes in elegant portraits to suggest that the sitter was accomplished in this area.

THE PORTRAIT IN VIENNA 1867–1918 *

9 October 2013 – 12 January 2014, Sainsbury Wing, Admission charge

The Portrait in Vienna 1867–1918 is the first exhibition to explore Viennese portraiture during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, showing both the continuity and the rupture between the Biedermeier and imperial traditions of the 19th century and the innovations of avant-garde artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka in the years around 1900. The period is widely regarded as the time when the avant-garde overthrew the academy.

The exhibition explores how portraiture came to be closely identified with the distinctive flourishing of modern art in Vienna during its famed fin-de-siècle years. It is divided into six sections: Biedermeier-Modern (the rediscovery around 1900 of early 19th-century portraits of the Alt-Wien bourgeoisie); Modern Family/Modern Child; The Artist; Modern Men/Modern Women; Love and Loss (the use of the portrait to declare love and commemorate the dead); and Finish and Failure (unfinished works abandoned by frustrated artists, or rejected by outraged sitters).