The Collections | Highlights | The Renaissance
Highlights: The Renaissance
The Renaissance, meaning rebirth, refers to the revival of interest in the visual and literary culture of Antiquity from about 1300-1600 and the Barber is rich in works from the period. Artists including Jan Gossaert painted subjects from ancient history and mythology such as Hercules and Deianira of 1517 (see right), looking to antique sculpture for their treatment of the human form. The term Renaissance is also used more specifically as a stylistic label to describe the visual arts of the period. It is traditionally divided into two, the Early and the High Renaissance. The first phase, during which the old Byzantine traditions in painting were replaced with a greater emphasis on the humanity of figures, is represented by exceptional religious works and portraits by Simone Martini, Giovanni Bellini and Botticelli. Whilst the High Renaissance, the period of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, is illustrated by masterpieces by Veronese, Bassano and Rosselli’s large altarpiece of The Adoration of the Infant Christ. Paintings from the Netherlands such as De Beer’s Nativity offer a vivid contrast to their Italian counterparts, full of a more down-to-earth realism and less tied to the revival of antique models.
The Barber’s outstanding collection of paintings is complemented by a fine group of Renaissance drawings by Fra Bartolomeo and by German masters such as Dürer and Holbein the younger. The earliest prints in the collection, in the form of woodcuts and engravings, include examples by Dürer and other artists after Italian Renaissance masters such as Raphael and Titian. The collection of sculpture includes a fine Madonna and Child in glazed terracotta, attributed to Giovanni della Robbia.