This summer a troupe of bona fide superstars has jetted in from Italy to make their Australian debut, to an audience in the hundreds of thousands. The occasion is Renaissance, a one-of-a-kind exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, and the guests of honour are 70-or-so priceless paintings and sculptures from 15th and 16th century Italy.
Centuries before the comics co-opted the names Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Raphael, and before Damien Hirst made art history by selling a jewelled human skull for £50,000,000, Renaissance Italy saw the dawning of an age of artists as superstars – a phenomenon we’ve never quite gotten over.
“This is the period where we see the rise of key artists working with a studio, and a sense of the artist as a heroic individual,” says curator Lucina Ward. “Before this, it was more like artisans in a workshop; it’s the beginning of the modern world and Western art traditions as we know them.”
Titian and Raphael are perhaps the two biggest drawcards on the Renaissance lineup, as famous proponents of the period’s diversification into non-secular forms like landscape and portraiture, and practices like artist workshops and private commissions.
However, Ward cites Bellini and Vivarini (better known among art history majors as frontrunners of the Renaissance) as two of the exciting discoveries for punters, and is quick to point out that even a well-known artist like Botticelli was only rediscovered relatively recently, in the 19th century.
“Many of the artists [in this exhibition] were better known at the time than they are now,” says Ward. “If there was no biography of an artist written by [influential Renaissance writer] Giorgio Vasari, then they tend to be less well known [now]. But we have to be wary of this,” Ward cautions, “because Vasari made things up; he’s a great story-teller.”
A Euro-centric curator whose first-hand experience of the Renaissance masters came relatively late in life (“practically like deciding to become a doctor at the age of 50!” she laughs), Ward speaks fondly and in detail about the works showing in Renaissance, unpacking a treasure chest full of secrets and factoids about the catalogue. In particular, she lingers on one of the Botticellis: an unusually large panel, almost two metres wide, titled 'The Story of Virginia the Roman'.
“It has an interesting, otherworldly quality, in the sense that it’s a story of injustice and rape and murder, but the effect when you approach it – this beautifully symmetrical architecture, the intricate detail, the figures in their wonderful drapery with reds and pinks and greens – it almost comes as a bit of a shock to realise the subject matter. The wonderful thing about Botticelli is he lures you in with these gorgeous colours, only to throw up these surprises.”
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