February 2012

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over five vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

If you can find the time for a day or so in Budapest before February 14, make the reservation now. For the city’s Fine Arts Museum - the Szepmuveszeti Muzeum - has organised and staged a huge and unmissable international loan show of Italian Renaissance art, 'Botticelli to Titian: Two Centuries of Italian Masterpieces'. Loans have come from the great museums of the world to supplement the by no means unimpressive home team, but it is those that have been drawn from little-known or little-visited institutions in eastern Europe that prove the irresistible lure to foreign visitors.

In pride of place, of course, is Leonardo’s celebrated but all too little visited “Lady with the Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani)”, owned by the Czaroryski Foundation in Cracow. This ravishing, compelling portrait of Duke Ludovico Sforza’s beautiful young mistress effectively revolutionised portraiture, offering not only psychological insight into her character, which the artist was best able to express by having her turn to gaze to one side and offer a dynamic, novel three-quarters view, but by painting her with an attribute which is a pun on both her name and that of her lover. A contemporary sonnet praising the portrait aptly describes her as “seeming to listen but not to speak”. The portrait presents Leonardo at his most humane and appealing.

Other firsts - for me at least - is the wonderful Antonello da Messina “Crucifixion” with the Strait of Messina in the background, on loan from Sibui in Romania, and Dosso Dossi’s unsettling “The Embrace” from Eger. Another highlight was seeing the gathered work of the highly idiosyncratic Michele Pannonio, a Hungarian who worked in mid 15th-century Ferrara.

This show is rich in big names - and big pictures - but there are lesser works too which tell the story or illustrate particular themes. By supplementing the national collections to stage such sweeping panoramic shows, the museum’s dynamic new director is set on opening up the long isolated Hungarian public to western art in all its aspects.

If this show were not enough, the museum’s print room - one of the great unsung collections of the world - is also presenting “The Alchemy of Beauty: Parmigianino Drawings and Prints” until March 15. Moreover, the recently opened “French Masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum” continues until April 25.

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