dürer and the renaissance between Germany and italy

Palazzo Reale

Piazza del Duomo, 12

Milan

21 February - 24 June 2018

The exhibition in Milan offers a selection of more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and prints. The highpoint of the German Renaissance, in the person of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), has finally arrived in Milan. Beginning on 21 February, 2018 the exhibition Dürer and the Renaissance between Germany and Italy introduces a magnificent and prestigious selection of works by Dürer and his German and (North) Italian contemporaries at the Palazzo Reale.

The heart of the show reveals the intrinsic qualities of Dürer’s œuvre in the various categories of painting, drawing, and the graphic arts. Technically, semantically, and iconographically, they all possess an innovative character. The intention of the exhibition is to make the great figure of the Renaissance Man from Nuremburg accessible for the first time not only to the public in Milan but also throughout Italy and internationally. 

Dürer’s career marked a historical moment of great socio-economic, cultural, and intellectual change in southern Germany. It was also a period of great openness towards Europe, whether (North) Italy or the Netherlands. 

It was a period that brought together the other great protagonists of the exhibition also on the level of mutual contact, intellectual and cultural. On the one hand, the other contemporary artists Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Baldung Grien, and on the other hand, the great painters, draughtsmen and printmakers from the Po Valley between Milan and Venice: Giorgione, Antonello da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Cima da Conegliano, Solario, Jacopo de'Barbari, Bartolomeo Veneto, and Lorenzo Lotto.

The exhibition takes as its subject the religious and spiritual debates as a foundation of Dürer’s works, his relationship to patrons through an analysis of his portraiture, mythological motives, altarpieces, his view of nature and of man, art between Classicism and anti-Classicism, as well as his artistic ambitions. The show, which is open until 24 June, 2018, includes a broad spectrum of masterpieces by Dürer and his contemporaries that have never before been shown in Milan.