Review: The UK's "Devotion by Design"
THE AUSTRALIAN
By Waldemar Januszczak
UNITED KINGDOM - When the director of London's National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, took over from the overly commercial Charles Saumarez Smith - on whose watch the National had begun selling postcards of its greatest masterpieces redone in the style of Hello! magazine - he announced that he would seek to import fewer international blockbusters and instead would put greater effort into exploring the gallery's existing collections. All of which happened to me at Devotion by Design, a particularly hushed examination of the function and form of the Italian altarpiece before 1500. The show looks at how altarpieces were made, what they were for, where they went and how they looked originally compared with how they look now.[link]
By Waldemar Januszczak
UNITED KINGDOM - When the director of London's National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, took over from the overly commercial Charles Saumarez Smith - on whose watch the National had begun selling postcards of its greatest masterpieces redone in the style of Hello! magazine - he announced that he would seek to import fewer international blockbusters and instead would put greater effort into exploring the gallery's existing collections. All of which happened to me at Devotion by Design, a particularly hushed examination of the function and form of the Italian altarpiece before 1500. The show looks at how altarpieces were made, what they were for, where they went and how they looked originally compared with how they look now.[link]
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