Girl with a Pearl Earring: The Myth of the Golden Age

When the Mauritshuis closed for a two-year renovation in April 2012, the museum dispatched forty of its greatest Dutch Golden Age paintings on an international tour, the collection’s first major overseas loan in nearly three decades. After drawing close to 1.2 million visitors at two venues in Japan and further large audiences at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Frick Collection in New York, the tour was extended by three and a half months for a single European stop. Bologna’s Palazzo Fava hosted the exhibition from 8 February to 25 May 2014, making Italy the sole European destination of the entire world tour.

Organised by the Mauritshuis together with exhibition producer Linea d’ombra and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna through its Genus Bononiae network, the Bologna presentation was the largest and final leg of the tour. Forty paintings filled six rooms of Palazzo Fava, a sixteenth-century Renaissance palazzo whose main hall and piano nobile are decorated with frescoes painted by Ludovico, Annibale, and Agostino Carracci in the 1580s and 1590s. The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna had acquired and restored the building in 2005, reopening it in 2011 as the city’s principal temporary exhibition venue within the Genus Bononiae museum circuit. The Mauritshuis director described Palazzo Fava as “a superb, historic location, and the perfect ending for the world tour.”

Girl with a Pearl Earring served as the centrepiece of the Bologna show, joined by a second Vermeer, Diana and Her Companions, along with four paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn and works by Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema, among others. The exhibition attracted 342,626 visitors over its sixteen-week run, generating roughly 27 million euros in tourist spending in the city and an estimated 89 million euros in wider economic activity across the Emilia-Romagna region. Curator Marco Goldin noted that by visitor numbers Bologna had outperformed every preceding stop on the tour, including San Francisco, Atlanta, and New York. The proceeds contributed to funding the Mauritshuis renovation, and the museum reopened its refurbished and expanded building on 27 June 2014, shortly after the Bologna showing closed.