For centuries, an unsigned portrait of a beautiful young woman at Rome's Galleria Borghese remained shrouded in mystery. Now a focus exhibition at San Francisco's Legion of Honor, Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" brings the enigmatic teenager to the U.S. for the first time with a new theory about her identity (January 9 to April 10). "Inexplicably magnetic, it stops you in its tracks," says Esther Bell, the show's organizer and curator of European Painting at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "It's a beautifully balanced painting and one of Raphael's most beautiful portraits." First recorded in the Borghese collection in 1682, "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" was misattributed to a number of artists, including Pietro Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Further clouding matters, in the mid-17th century, an unknown artist changed the sitter into St. Catherine, covering her bare shoulders with a cloak and replacing the small unicorn in her lap Read More
A Donatello Restored
Sculpture’s key role in the Florentine Renaissance is the theme of “The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400-1460” at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through August 18 and the Louvre in Paris (September 26, 2013 to January 6, 2014). One of the show’s highlights is an early bronze by Florence’s Donatello, Saint Louis of Toulouse, which recently underwent extensive restoration. The larger-than-life statue was commissioned by the Guelph party as a tribute to the figure who renounced his claim to rule Naples to become a Franciscan. Louis died at 23 and Donatello depicts him with delicate boyish features in bishop’s regalia holding a putti-adorned crosier in his left hand and giving a blessing with his right. Enamel, rock crystal and fleurs-de-lis decorate his mitre. Donatello created the figure for the eastern wall of the church of Orsanmichele where both the sun and a classically inspired marble and gold niche added to its brilliance. But with the Guelph Read More
“Treasurer of the Art”: Paolo Veronese at the Ringling Museum
Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, Paolo Veronese, circa 1572 About the Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese, 17th century writer Marco Boschini raved: “He is the treasurer of the art and of the colors. This is not painting -- it is magic that casts a spell on people who see it produced.” Among those spellbound by Veronese’s theatrical canvases were American art collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick, and circus impresario John Ringling. “Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice” unites 70 of Veronese’s finest works in North America at Ringling's Sarasota, Florida museum -- the first comprehensive U.S. survey of the artist in 25 years. The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art organized the show with loans from many institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Harvard Art Museums, and Cleveland Museum of Art. “It was easy for Americans to get excited about Veronese, Read More