Botticelli to Titian [antikvár]

Director's Foreword For centuries, Italian Renaissance art and its greatest masters enjoyed unconditional reverence. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Leonardo's Last Supper was popularized by a multitude of oleographs, copies of Raphael's Madonna della sedia were considered icons, and framed reproductions of The School of Athens adorned the walls of institutions all across Europe. Respect for the geniuses of the high Renaissance, for Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, became a cult; their works and styles were canonized by academies of art as being unimpeachable examples of perfection. It is no surprise that the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not to mention the exponents of the twentieth-century avant-garde, rose up against this canonization. The Fauvists, the Cubists, the Surrealists and the pioneers of non-figurative painting all defined their own endeavours in opposition to the pictorial norms of the high Renaissance; this was how they made a break with the past. At the same time, the Expressionists and Surrealists in particular would rediscover the most anticlassical exponents of Mannerism, which held sway in the greater part of the sixteenth century, as being their forebears. It is, of course, never the task of artists striving to tread their own path to be fair to their predecessors. Yet however legitimate the rebellion against the academism that canonized the Renaissance may have been, the summary rejection of the artists of the period was not. The great figures of the Renaissance - to take only the painters - from Masaccio to Titian, from Uccello to Veronese, did nothing but innovate and experiment, in rivalry both with each other and with classical examples. However much posterity might have created an indisputable authority of Leonardo, there can never have been a more belligerent enemy of authority in the history of art than he was. Michelangelo, Titian, and even Raphael, who died so young, all had careers as rich in turning points and "periods" as later only Picasso's would do. Thus we can say with certainty: the Renaissance was as avant-garde an era as there ever has been. Its greatest masters observed the world and man within it with unprecedented openness, and it was with unheard-of ambition that they strove to lay down the scientific foundations for art, and to perfect the devices of the craft. In order that today's museum visitors might not just admire but also be fond of the Italian painters of this period, that they might look at their works not just out of obligation but out of inner conviction, it is necessary for them to approach the exhibition space displaying their works with the same openness, curiosity, and thirst for knowledge that characterized the works' creators. There is now an exceptional opportunity for this in the Szépművészeti Múzeum: never before has a Hungarian exhibition of this magnitude been devoted to Italian Renaissance art. Naturally, the extent of the different schools and individual artistic careers is such that even an exhibition three times this size could not give a