New Rijksmuseum exhibition showcases Renaissance portraits – KIRO 7 News Seattle

AMSTERDAM – (AP) – As the COVID-19 lockdowns wear off and borders reopen, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is hosting people from all over Europe, depicted in more than 100 Renaissance portraits.

The new exhibition “Remember Me” at the Dutch National Museum covers the centuries 1470-1570 and shows portraits of masters such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein and Tizian from all over the continent, who underscore mankind’s continuing desire for memory.

It also shows the effort that artists have made to portray people, their wealth, their jobs, their power and their love for one another.

While the exhibition was already in the works before the global pandemic hit the world last year, the desire to be remembered felt more urgent than ever amid the lockdowns, Museum Director General Taco Dibbits said.

“With the corona crisis we have now felt that people are so far away that they cannot come to you. You couldn’t travel, ”said Dibbits on Tuesday. “That was always the case in the Renaissance, when it was much more difficult to travel and … there was this great longing to have people with you. I think it’s something we’ve been feeling for the past year and a half. “

The exhibition offers a snapshot of European society during the Renaissance and for the first time includes in a single exhibition the two earliest individual portraits of black men known in Europe – a painting by Jan Jansz Mostaert depicting a man in military clothing, possibly Christophle. was le More, a personal bodyguard of the Roman-German Emperor Charles V, and a 1508 drawing “Portrait of an African Man” in black chalk by Albrecht Dürer, on loan from the Albertina in Vienna.

For Dibbits, whose museum has just completed a groundbreaking exhibition that focuses on the history of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies, the two portraits are an opportunity to bring Europe’s black population out of the dark during the Renaissance.

“In the Renaissance, around 1500, there was a presence of Africans in Europe and we thought it was very important to show these two works, to show that presence too,” he said. “I think for a long time in the history of art these works were invisible. So people just thought, well, they don’t exist. “

For Dibbits and Matthias Ubl, the curator of the Museum for Old Dutch, Italian and German Painting, one of the outstanding highlights of the show is the enigmatic “Portrait of a Young Girl”, which was painted by Petrus Christ around 1470. The portrait of an unknown girl is on loan from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which is leaving the museum for the first time since 1994.

Ubl said he was first intrigued by the work when he saw it on a poster about 20 years ago as a student in London.

“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s just so great. This is one of the most beautiful portraits there is. ‘ And now it’s here and it’s almost unreal, ”said Ubl.

Bringing all loaned portraits from museums across Europe, the UK and the US to Amsterdam was a feat in a time of travel restrictions. The show opens October 1st and runs through January 16th.

“We are incredibly grateful that we brought them all together,” said Dibbits. “And it’s really like a (re-) union, you could say. It was as if real people were coming together again and these people from the Renaissance were now gathered here again. “

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