Smart Museum inaugurates new galleries with Renaissance and Italian Baroque exhibition

The University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art will reopen its new Old Master Gallery Nov. 23 with the featured exhibition “The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe.” This intimate, thematic exhibition of approximately 65 paintings, drawings, bronze sculptures, decorative arts, and books from 15th- to18th-century Europe will explore the Renaissance impulse to find inspiration in the ancient past. Objects will be drawn from the Museum’s collection, augmented by loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Newberry Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and private collections. The exhibition will be on view through Feb. 29.

“The Place of the Antique” was organized by University of Chicago Art History Professor Ingrid Rowland, an expert on both ancient and Renaissance Rome, with the assistance of University of Chicago graduate students. The exhibition will use Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque and Neoclassical objects to trace the European revival of antiquity from its origins in 15th-century humanism through the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Organized around a range of themes, from the literary to the socio-historical, “The Place of the Antique” will offer a new framework for viewing the classicizing tradition.

Highlights in the exhibition will include the Smart Museum’s Farnese Reliquary, circa 1550, which is attributed to Antonio Gentili da Faenza. Recently conserved and restored to its original splendor, this rare, gilt-silver religious artifact, was probably commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in honor of his grandfather, Pope Paul III. Also included in the exhibition is an extraordinary set of elegant silver and gold tableware by the same artist, circa 1580, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition will offer a rare chance to see elaborate, small-scale cast bronzes of Francesco Bertos, the late Baroque Italian virtuoso sculptor: these sculptural groups portraying mythological figures, The Punishment of Dirce and Marcus Curtius, circa 1690-1710, are on loan from an anonymous collector.

“The Place of the Antique” is made possible by a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to encourage interdisciplinary use of the Smart Museum’s collections by University of Chicago faculty and students both through courses and exhibition format. Two other special exhibitions are scheduled for the Old Master Gallery as part of this initiative. These projects include “Pious Journeys: Christian Devotional Art and Practice in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance,” spring 2000, and “Theatricality in the Baroque,” winter 2001.

The museum has recently completed a significant $2 million renovation project, that features new galleries, a new education study room, and new storage facilities. Also on view, through March 12, is the special exhibition “Surrealism in America During the 1930s and 1940s: Selections from the Penny and Elton Yasuna Collection.”

“The Place of the Antique” is accompanied by a 110-page catalogue for sale in the museum shop.