VANCOUVER – This summer, the Vancouver Art Gallery is playing host to masterpieces of Italian art spanning more than 500 years.
Sourced from Scottish museums, Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums features 40 paintings by Italian artists between the late 14th and late 19th centuries. The exhibit includes paintings by iconic artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian (Tiziano Vecellio).
European art of this kind is rarely on display in Vancouver.
“Exhibitions such as this are rare and the fact that this is drawn from a single public collection makes it all the more remarkable,” said Ian Thom, a curator with the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The collection on display, comes from the Glasgow Museums in Scotland; the bulk of which are gifts to the Glasgow Museums. According to Thom, this collection is a “testament to philanthropy”.
Twenty-one paintings come from a single collector, Archibald McLellan, who donated his collection to the City of Glasgow in the mid-19th century. Other major donors were Dame Anna Maxwell Macdonald, John Graham Gilbert and Sir Claude Phillips.
A lesson in the history of Italian art, the exhibition does not focus on a single artist or period of art history in Italy. The paintings in the collection are representative of the artists’ works, and by extension, a representation of the various schools of painting in Italy during the European Renaissance.
The exhibition will be on display until Oct. 4.
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