Dresden: Mirror of the World. The Dresden State Art Collections in Japan

“Dresden: Mirror of the World” was a landmark touring exhibition drawn from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, presenting around 240 works from nine of the institution’s twelve museums. Assembled to show how Saxony’s ruling Wettins shaped one of Europe’s greatest encyclopaedic collections over three centuries, the selection ranged from Old Master paintings and Baroque sculpture to Meissen porcelain, arms and armour, jewellery, costumes, and scientific instruments. It opened at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe on 8 March 2005 and remained on view until 22 May 2005, before travelling to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (28 June to 19 September 2005), where it attracted more than 286,000 visitors.

The exhibition was organised around seven thematic chapters tracing the Electors’ and Kings’ ambition to gather the art of the world within a single court. Successive sections explored the influx of works from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan, placing European painting alongside East Asian porcelain and Turkish luxury objects to illustrate Dresden’s self-conscious role as a cosmopolitan mirror of global culture. Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657–59) and the earlier The Procuress (1656) both made the journey, appearing alongside Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede in the Dutch and Flemish section and offering visitors a rare survey of Vermeer’s range from his genre beginnings to his mature interior scenes.

The Japan tour was the first time either Dresden Vermeer had been seen in the country. The Kobe presentation coincided with the tenth anniversary of the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, giving the visit added resonance for the Hyogo region. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated bilingual catalogue and was organised in cooperation with NHK and major Japanese newspapers.