Flesh and Blood: Italian Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum offers a rare opportunity to experience the fierce beauty of European art from the 16th and 17th centuries. Renowned Renaissance artists such as Titian and Raphael join Baroque masters including Artemisia Gentileschi, Jusepe de Ribera, Guido Reni, and Bernardo Cavallino to reveal the aspirations and limitations of the human body and the many ways it can express love and devotion, physical labor, and tragic suffering.
A long period of creativity, inspiration, and striving for knowledge, the Renaissance peaked in Italy as artists turned their attention to the classical world and made the human body the center of artistic representation. Renaissance art is interested in the naturalistic depiction of the human form and its emotional life; it seeks a balance between the spiritual and material. Flesh and Blood draws from the illustrious Farnese collection begun by Pope Paul III, who oversaw Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, to present notions of beauty and power in the 16th century. A commissioned portrait of the future pope as a cardinal by the young master Raphael opens the exhibition with ambition and poise.
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