From Vermeer to Kandinsky

"Da Vermeer a Kandisky — Capolavori dai musei del mondo" (From Vermeer to Kandinsky: Masterpieces from the World's Museums) opened at Castel Sismondo in Rimini on 21 January 2012 and ran until 6 May. Organised by Marco Goldin's Linea d'ombra foundation in partnership with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini, the exhibition was conceived as a survey of Western painting from the mid-fifteenth through the twentieth century, and marked the fifteenth anniversary of Linea d'ombra's activity as an organiser of Italian touring blockbusters. The title names the two chronological poles of the selection: Vermeer as representative of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age, and Kandinsky as an emblem of European modernism.

Approximately seventy works were drawn from around thirty international museums, including the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Tate in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The display was organised thematically and by region, moving from Venetian Renaissance painting (Titian, Veronese, Lorenzo Lotto) through seventeenth-century Italian classicism (Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni), Spanish Golden Age masters (Velázquez, El Greco, Murillo), Dutch and Flemish painters, English landscapists (Turner, Constable), French Impressionists (Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh), and on to twentieth-century European modernism (Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Francis Bacon). Goldin described the ambition as "a great lesson in art history, open and comprehensible to all."

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (c. 1654–56), lent by the National Galleries of Scotland, represented Vermeer within the Dutch section of the survey. As his earliest known painting and his only work on a religious subject, it occupied an unusual position in any chronological narrative of his career. Its monumental scale and its debt to the Utrecht Caravaggisti set it apart from the intimate domestic interiors that made Vermeer famous, making it a point of contrast in a display otherwise dominated by works from the mature seventeenth-century tradition.