Two major exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai have opened with masterpieces by Italian Renaissance masters and other European artists, supplied by the Uffizi museum in Florence. These exhibitions are an example of how a dialogue of civilization can work, based on the highest product of two cultures.
The first exhibition, entitled “Botticelli and the Renaissance,” can be visited until the 27th of August at the Bund One Art Museum in Shanghai. It offers a selection of paintings by Sandro Botticelli as well as a collection of works by great Quattrocento masters, such as Filippo Lippi, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, and Cosimo Rosselli.
The second exhibition, entitled “Self-portrait Masterpieces,”’ will be open until Sept. 10 at the National Museum of China (NMC) in Beijing. It shows fifty self-portraits from the Renaissance to today, featuring Raphael and Rembrandt as major highlights.
Artists portrait themselves as if they are looking at themselves in a mirror while staying conscious of the fact this self-depiction will one day be seen by someone else, exhibition co-curator Vanessa Gavioli told Global Times.
“So to some extent, we are eye to eye,” Gavioli said, adding that these portraits allow audiences to freely imagine the character of these Renaissance figures while “privately” connecting with European fine cultures.
Art expert Qu Fei told the Global Times that a self-portrait can provide rich information about the artist’s cultural and social environment through details such as side decoration, the figure’s facial expression, and his or her clothes and accessories.
