Religious Art of the Italian Renaissance on View During 2014-15 Museum Season
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter
One of art’s jobs is, of course, to enlarge our view of both the past and the present by presenting alternatives. For example, the nasty pagan bits in “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence,” which lands at the National Gallery of Art in Washington from the Uffizi on Feb. 1, should do something to change the impression that Italian Renaissance art was all madonnas and putti. Yet by the same token, “Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy,” opening at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville on Oct. 31, will argue how insistently spiritual — and political — religious art from the period was. [link]
By Holland Cotter
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| Piero di Cosimo's "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine of Alexandria, Peter and John the Evangelist with Angels," completed by 1493. |