Italian Old Masters from Raphael to Tiepolo
The Collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts

	Poster of the exhibition

From April 24 to August 4, 2002, in the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented Italian Old Masters from Raphael to Tiepolo: The Collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, a remarkable exhibition featuring masterworks of Italian painting by many of the most celebrated names associated with that nation's artistic heritage. The exhibition, which encompassed all of the major schools of Italian art from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, included forty-three illustrious works ranging in scale from intimate devotional subjects and portraits to state commissions, monumental altarpieces and mythological paintings.

This presentation of highlights from one of Europe's greatest Italian Old Master collections - and one that has received limited exposure in North America - includes works by such renowned artists as Bernardo Bellotto, Annibale Carracci, Filippino Lippi, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano del Piombo, Raphael, Sebastiano Ricci, Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese. The exhibition was mounted specifically for Montreal by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. After the collection's three-month showing here, the precious paintings returned directly to Budapest.

The earliest masterpiece was a large crucifix, cut to the shape of the Cross and figure of the crucified Christ, executed by a Florentine painter of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Monaco, whose works were often moving and lyrical. Among the most famous paintings in the exhibition was Raphael's world-renowned Esterházy Madonna, named after the Hungarian aristocratic collectors who once owned it. This exquisite and intimate portrayal of the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John is set in a landscape of surpassing beauty. The rarely lent work, a transcendent treasure of the Budapest collection, was executed and left not quite finished by the master in 1508, when he left Florence for Rome. Passages of visible underpainting in this superbly conserved High Renaissance panel reveal Raphael's masterful painting and drawing and provide insight into the methods he used to work up the composition. The exhibition featured yet another intimate and tender study of the Madonna and Child by one of the finest Florentine painters of the late fifteenth century, Filippino Lippi.

Titian was the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance and, with Raphael, one of the two greatest Italian portraitists of the age. His Portrait of Doge Marcantonio Trevisani is a model of his aggressive use of the brush to evoke, with the mastery of his mature style, the august power and authority of the subject. It was complemented by other elegant, sensual portraits by such Venetian luminaries as Sebastiano del Piombo and Veronese. The portrait of a man by sixteenth-century Brescian painter Romanino presented, by contrast, a more assertively naturalistic depiction of its handsome subject.

Works of dramatic power and moving explorations of human sensibilities included the introspection of Sassetta's Saint Thomas Aquinas at Prayer, Sodoma's tragic Death of Lucretia, the Cavaliere d'Arpino's Erotic Diana and Actaeon, Tintoretto's Hercules Expelling the Faun from Omphale's Bed, Antonio Bellucci's Danae, Annibale Carracci's tender Christ and the Samaritan Woman, Johann Liss's powerful Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Bernardo Cavallino's monumental Meeting at the Golden Gate, Jacopo Bassano's poignant Road to Calvary, Alessandro Allori's Body of Christ with Two Angels, Bernardo Strozzi's masterful large-scale Tribute Money and the magnificent theatre of Giuseppe Maria Crespi's Archangel Michael Defeating the Rebel Angels. The exhibition culminated with The Virgin with Six Saints, a rapturous orchestration of colouristic effects by the last great genius of the Venetian school of painting, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

This unique presentation of unforgettable paintings from Budapest provided visitors with an unequalled opportunity to experience first-hand the great glories of the many schools of Italian art over the course of four centuries.

Italian Old Masters from Raphael to Tiepolo: The Collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts was a co-production of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, made possible through the collaboration of Miklós Mojzer, general director of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. The choice of works was made by the exhibition's curator, Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

A 64-page catalogue featuring all the exhibited works in full colour, with informative essays by Vilmos Tátrai, director of collections, and Ildikó Ember, head of Old Masters collections, of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, was published in connection with this historic event.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts would like to thank, its media partners, La Presse, The Gazette, 105.7 RYTHME FM, CJPX and CJAD. It is also grateful to the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec and the Department of Canadian Heritage for their ongoing funding. The international exhibition programme of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts enjoys the financial support of the Exhibition Fund of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Foundation and the Paul G. Desmarais Fund.

This exhibition was presented by AIM Funds Management Inc.