The Frick Collection in New York will offer visitors a chance to experience the Renaissance workshop of Italian artist Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) in an exhibition opening October 7.
Titled Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action, the show includes three paintings and 50 of the 180 drawings still remaining from the 1500s, and takes visitors through a recreation of the Florentine painter's work space.
Viewers will be able to enter the recreated workshop, see the models who posed for drawings, and admire the skill of the artist's hand and the immediacy of the tracing through the collection on display, on loan from several international museums.
Del Sarto was a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Parmigianino and Titian, but not as famous on an international level.
Active in Florence between 1510 and 1530, he contributed to the artistic revolution known as the Renaissance.
The exhibition was organized with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
"The allure of the drawings comes largely from the ability to be transported to the moment of creation, almost as if you were allowed to look over the master's shoulder while he captured the intuitions of his mind in a physical representation on paper," Timothy Potts and Ian Wardropper, directors of the J.
Paul Getty Museum and the Frick Collection respectively, wrote in the preface to the exhibition catalog.
"Being able to do that with an artist who lived 500 years ago is even more extraordinary," they wrote.
One of the three paintings on display is The Medici Holy Family, on loan from the Palatine Gallery at the Pitti Palace.
It was examined with infrared technology to demonstrate the stages involved in Del Sarto's artistic process.
Julian Brooks, the exhibition's curator, said the inspection "revealed that Del Sarto continued to work with pencil even on top of the canvas".
The Pitti Palace also loaned a completed panel of Del Sarto's painting Saint John the Baptist, while the Uffizi Gallery contributed 18 drawings to the exhibition.
"It's amazing to think that the last time these drawings were together was probably in the master's workshop," said Brooks, who has been working on this exhibition for five years.
A third painting, on display in the Oval Room of the museum founded by American steel magnate and art patron Henry Frick, is Portrait of a Young Man. Painted in 1517-1518, it is on loan from the London National Gallery.
The exhibition's aim is to give the drawings and paintings the same stature they had in the eyes of Del Sarto's peers.
A teacher to both Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, Del Sarto's reputation was damaged by a third student, Giorgio Vasari. The author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects criticised his teacher as weak. Del Sarto could have surpassed Raphael, Vasari argued, if it hadn't been for his wife, who forced him to pass up opportunities and to portray her too often in his work.
The exhibition runs through January 10, 2016.
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