Leonardo da Vinci - "Lady with an Ermine"(from Czartoryski Museum, Krakow) on the exhibition "From Botticelli to Titian Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art" at Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts
28 October 2009 - 14 February 2010
Museum of Fine Arts
Budapest, XIV. Dózsa György út 41.
"Lady with an Ermine", one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings and one of just a handful of portraits of women (from Czartoryski Museum, Krakow) among the highlights of a temporary exhibition "From Botticelli to Titian Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art" at Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts!
On show: 28 October 2009 – 14 February 2010
Museum of Fine Arts
Budapest, XIV. Dózsa György út 41.
A lecture of David Alan Brown, Curator of Italian Paintings National Gallery of Art (Washington): “Leonardo’s Lady with the Ermine”
Entrance free.
29 October 2009 (Thursday), from 3pm till 5 pm
Museum of Fine Arts
Leonardo’s Lady with the Ermine has been called the “first modern portrait.” It depicts Lodovico Sforza’s beautiful young mistress Cecilia Gallerani in a most original manner. Breaking with the tradition of the profile portrait, Leonardo shows the lady in three quarter view, turning as if toward the duke, her lover. The realism of her face and hand and of the ermine she holds must be based on studies from the life of the kind in which Leonardo excelled.
About the picture
Lady with an Ermine is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, from around 1489–1490. The subject of the portrait is identified as Cecilia Gallerani, and was probably painted at a time when she was the mistress of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and Leonardo was in the service of the Duke.
The painting is one of only four female portraits painted by Leonardo, the others being the Mona Lisa, the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci and La Belle Ferronière. It is displayed by the Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland and is cited in the museum's guide as the first truly modern portrait.
The teenage girl in the painting is likely Cecilia Gallerani, who was the mistress of Milan's ruler Lodovico Sforza il Moro, da Vinci's patron. It was probably painted in his early thirties, between 1482 and 1485, about 20 years before the Mona Lisa, and shows his sitter for the first time in a pose that would soon become the standard. Art historians say it is the world's first modern-age portrait ever painted, according to the Czartoryski Museum.
The exhibition will include more than 110 works of Italian Renaissance paintings, 30 from the Museum of Fine Arts' own collection and 80 on loan from Italian museums. Works will also come from the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
A significant number of the paintings, drawings, graphics, sculptures and antiquities preserved in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts originate from Italy. More than one third of the Old Masters collection alone, comprising over one thousand items, are works by Italian masters, so we are justified in claiming that the museum is one of the most important venues of Italian culture in Hungary. We wish to organise an exhibition showing a wide spectrum of Italian art. The masterpieces, borrowed mainly from Italian collections, will enable visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts to augment their knowledge about Italian painting based on the local collection. A prominent place will be reserved at the exhibition for works by those great innovators who are not represented in the museum’s otherwise rich collection which fully documents individual schools and tendencies.
In the recent past there were two exhibitions in Hungary that provided a comprehensive picture of the painting of a nation through its masterpieces. The exhibition entitled El Greco, Velázquez, Goya. Masterpieces of Five Centuries of Spanish Painting was staged by the museum in spring 2006. Works were borrowed from several German museums and in addition from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Prado in Madrid. With its over 200,000 visitors the exhibition was the ninth most frequented one displaying works in the world in 2006 by the old masters. At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005 another similar exhibition had been hosted by the Műcsarnok, bearing the title Light and Shade – Masterpieces, 400 Years of French Painting. This exhibition attracted 300,000 visitors to our partner institution. Such large-scale, comprehensive exhibitions enjoy success worldwide: for example, the Guggenheim Museum’s From El Greco to Picasso enjoyed enormous success in New York last year.
The various schools and stylistic trends will be duly represented at this exhibition, and several works by the most famous Italian geniuses will be on display.
