Rubens, Van Dyck and the Splendour of Flemish Painting
Rubens exhibition in Budapest
The exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts running from late October showcases the Golden Age of Flemish painting through the art of the foremost Baroque master of European art, Peter Paul Rubens, and that of his contemporaries.
Rubens, Van Dyck and the Splendour of Flemish Painting is based on the Museum of Fine Arts’ rich Flemish material of paintings as well as numerous graphic works. The museum’s main cooperating partner is LIECHTENSTEIN. The Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna, contributing twenty remarkable masterpieces, among them a piece from Rubens’ monumental Decius Mus cycle (The Interpretation of the Victim), to be displayed along with the splendid tapestry based on the painting and woven with gold and silver thread (Palacio Real, Madrid). This will be the debut for the two works to be exhibited together.
The exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts running from late October showcases the Golden Age of Flemish painting through the art of the foremost Baroque master of European art, Peter Paul Rubens, and that of his contemporaries.
Rubens, Van Dyck and the Splendour of Flemish Painting is based on the Museum of Fine Arts’ rich Flemish material of paintings as well as numerous graphic works. The museum’s main cooperating partner is LIECHTENSTEIN. The Princely Collections, Vaduz–Vienna, contributing twenty remarkable masterpieces, among them a piece from Rubens’ monumental Decius Mus cycle (The Interpretation of the Victim), to be displayed along with the splendid tapestry based on the painting and woven with gold and silver thread (Palacio Real, Madrid). This will be the debut for the two works to be exhibited together.
Besides that, the 120 or so displayed works have been loaned from forty prominent public collections, including the Louvre in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in Washington DC and the National Gallery in London. In addition to almost thirty masterpieces by Rubens and more than a dozen by Van Dyck, visitors will be able to see excellent works by other Flemish masters too.
The main goal of the exhibition is to highlight Peter Paul Rubens’s genius and the pivotal influence of his artistic output upon his age through works in the museum’s own collections and the loaned pieces, while showcasing the versatile, stylistically and thematically rich 17th-century Flemish painting, which developed from and alongside Rubens’ art. Another important aspect of the Budapest show is to draw attention to the extensive and lasting cultural ties between the Southern Netherlands and Hungary, in which a key figure was Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Habsburg.
The exhibition is made up of ten large sections. The first two will guide visitors to the prominent centres of the 17th-century Southern Netherlands, its sovereigns and outstanding artists; they will also paint a picture about the reign of the archducal couple, Albert and Isabella of Habsburg, a period during which the victorious Counter-Reformation and the flourishing of Catholicism brought about a new era of art patronage. The third section will focus on the multifarious ties Flemish painters had with Italy, stressing the important role the Italian years and the works of Antiquity, the Renaissance and contemporary masters played in the art and life of both Rubens and Van Dyck. This will be followed by works with biblical and mythological themes. The spirit of the Counter-Reformation will be evoked in two sections with pieces made for private devotion and promoting the cult of the saints, as well as large-scale altarpieces.
The joint display of one of the tapestries of the Golden Decius Mus cycle and Rubens’s cartoon painted for it will be a true curiosity of the exhibition. Visitors will also get an insight into tapestry art, a genre renewed by Rubens, and its process from oil sketches to weaving in this section. The next part will bring masterpieces of the period’s most characteristic genres to the public: still-lifes, landscapes and animal depictions. It will familiarize visitors with the collaborative method typical of Flemish painting: the way in which artists specializing in different genres jointly created works of art.
The chapter devoted to portraits will include numerous brilliantly executed likenesses by Van Dyck, including the Szépművészeti Múzeum’s new acquisition of prominent value: the portrait of Maria Henrietta Stuart. This unit will also draw attention to Van Dyck’s artistic activity in England, during which he exerted a transformative influence upon English portrait painting and introduced changes that shaped the European development of the genre. The closing section of the exhibition will introduce visitors to genre pictures and works illustrating proverbs. This section will demonstrate how the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder moralizing upon the follies of human nature fundamentally defined 17th-century Flemish genre painting depicting the lives and festivities of peasants, Netherlandish proverbs and fables widely known in Europe.
Similarly to the Museum of Fine Arts’ other large-scale exhibitions, a richly illustrated catalogue containing studies and catalogue entries in Hungarian and English was made for this show with the participation of renowned foreign and Hungarian art historians.
Exhibition curator: Júlia Tátrai, art historian and head of the Department of Old Master Paintings
