From Renaissance to Rococo

“From Renaissance to Rococo: Four Centuries of European Drawing, Painting and Sculpture“ was a major loan exhibition organised jointly by the National Museum of Western Art, TBS, and the Yomiuri Shimbun, with works drawn from three divisions of the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin): the Gemäldegalerie, the Bode Museum, and the Kupferstichkabinett. The 107 works on view spanned the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, placing Italian and Northern European traditions in dialogue and tracing the transformation of European art from the devotional imagery of the late Gothic period to the elegant refinement of the Rococo.

The exhibition was organised into six thematic and chronological sections covering religion and daily life in the fifteenth century, portraiture across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the contorted figures of Mannerism, the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and a dedicated gallery of thirty Italian Renaissance drawings from the Kupferstichkabinett. Artists represented included Botticelli, Raphael, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Tilman Riemenschneider, Rembrandt, Diego Velázquez, and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The drawings section featured sheets by Botticelli and Michelangelo that were rarely displayed publicly and returned to storage after the tour.

The Gemäldegalerie contributed Vermeer’s “Woman with a Pearl Necklace” (c. 1662-1665) as one of the exhibition’s headline loans, marking the painting’s first showing in Japan. The work, in which a young woman fastens a string of pearls before a sunlit window, exemplifies the Delft master’s command of diffuse natural light and quietly absorbed domestic gesture, and its inclusion anchored the exhibition’s treatment of the Dutch Golden Age. The show attracted 399,312 visitors in Tokyo before travelling to the Kyushu National Museum from October to December 2012.