Exhibition of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting

Held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Rome’s Via Nazionale from 4 January to 14 February 1954, this survey brought approximately 187 paintings of the Dutch Golden Age to Italian audiences for the first time on such a scale. Works by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, and their contemporaries filled the grand neoclassical halls, tracing the full range of seventeenth-century Dutch painting from portraiture and genre scenes to landscape and history painting. A catalogue published by De Luca in Rome accompanied the Roman showing; when the exhibition transferred to the Palazzo Reale in Milan (February to April 1954), a second edition was issued by Silvana. The tour marked a significant moment of postwar cultural exchange between Italy and the Netherlands.

Four works by Vermeer were included, each lent by a different European institution. Diana and Her Companions (catalogue no. 175, listed as “La toletta di Diana“) came from the Mauritshuis in The Hague; The Milkmaid (no. 176, catalogued as “La cuciniera”) from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; The Art of Painting (no. 177, listed as “L’atelier”) from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; and The Glass of Wine (no. 178) from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Together they offered an unusually broad introduction to Vermeer at a time when his work was still known to many Italian visitors only through reproductions, spanning his early mythological composition, his mature genre interiors, and his monumental allegory of painting itself.