Selected works of the collection display are veiled from 14 September to 24 November 2024, as they are part of curatorial interventions and the project Freedom Endures. Censorship, Propaganda, and Art.
The curatorial selection combines knowledge from the latest art history findings with research into the lifestyle, and housing and material culture in Western European households. The exhibited genre paintings, portraits, landscapes, and still lifes document not only the taste of the period, but map a path full of bold experiments leading up to the threshold of Modernism.
You will get to know the first-class works of Italian, Netherlandish, Dutch and other masters such as Hans von Aachen, Cecco del Caravaggio, Joachim Beuckelaer, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Gottfried Kneller, and through them you will be transported to Venice, Milan, Amsterdam, and Antwerp, the most important art centers of those times.
Around the middle of the 16th century, the first works of unusual importance were created; they exclusively featured secular themes where artists turned functional sacred objects into an earthly world of experiences. Collectors, patrons, and commissioners of art competed with each other in the decoration of interiors, which reflected their social status. The historical, and at first glance realistic paintings that decorated them, almost always had a symbolic meaning.
