The Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace reopens today with what is, if not quite in number, certainly in quality, an exhibition to which the vulgar term blockbuster will no doubt be applied. It is of some 170 paintings and drawings that fall within the broad headings of the Renaissance and the Baroque in Italy, the 16th and 17th centuries - no knick-knacks or curiosities, no gold, silver or rare porcelain, just paintings and drawings to rouse the envy of every other collection from St Petersburg to Los Angeles, the envy even of the Vatican. It is not a didactic exercise. It does not seek to demonstrate the development of the Renaissance in Florence when Rome and Venice had overtaken the city where it all began, nor the creeping supremacy of Bologna at the end of the 16th century, nor the explosion of tenebrous Caravaggism in Rome, nor the symbiotic conflict of cool classicism with the heat and flurry of Baroque emotion. At all these the exhibition hints and gives examples, but they are to be seen alone, as it were, not as educative in the company they keep, not as the instruments of an illustrated lecture, for the exhibition seeks primarily to offer the simple and sublime enjoyment of looking at great works of art.
The Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace reopens today with what is, if not quite in number, certainly in quality, an exhibition to which the vulgar term blockbuster will no doubt be applied. It is of some 170 paintings and drawings that fall within the broad headings of the Renaissance and the Baroque in Italy, the 16th and 17th centuries - no knick-knacks or curiosities, no gold, silver or rare porcelain, just paintings and drawings to rouse the envy of every other collection from St Petersburg to Los Angeles, the envy even of the Vatican. It is not a didactic exercise. It does not seek to demonstrate the development of the Renaissance in Florence when Rome and Venice had overtaken the city where it all began, nor the creeping supremacy of Bologna at the end of the 16th century, nor the explosion of tenebrous Caravaggism in Rome, nor the symbiotic conflict of cool classicism with the heat and flurry of Baroque emotion. At all these the exhibition hints and gives examples, but they are to be seen alone, as it were, not as educative in the company they keep, not as the instruments of an illustrated lecture, for the exhibition seeks primarily to offer the simple and sublime enjoyment of looking at great works of art.
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