Exhibition - Past
The Sky is the Limit. The landscape of the Low Countries. Rockox House Museum, in conjunction with the KMSKA and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
25 March through 2 July 2017
Painting underwent a revolution during the course of the 16th century. New genres, including landscapes, took the art world by storm and flowed into the collections of rich patricians, traders and the nobility. Landscape served as background subject-matter for biblical and mythological scenes, but painters started to express themselves with the new genre in the creation of endless variations on townscapes, mountainscapes, panoramas, depictions of hell and seascapes.
One of the pioneers of Flemish landscape painting was Joachim Patinir. Pieter Bruegel the Elder was painting 'world landscapes' around the middle of the 16th century. In the 17th century, Rubens refocused attention on the landscape with his penchant for the countryside, his panoramic views and the rich diversity of colour on his palette.
The exhibition is made up of loans from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Dresden, which will itself be devoting a major exhibition to this subject in the autumn of 2016, together with landscapes from the KMSKA and the Rockox House.
Clara Peeters
18 June through 2 October 2016 at the Rockox House Museum
The Rockox House and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) are organising a series of small-scale exhibitions as part of the Golden Cabinet initiative. Clara Peeters:Dinner is served! is number six.
Clara Peeters was an outsider – one of the few female fine artists in the early seventeenth century, not to mention a pioneer in the development of still life as a genre.
We know very little about her life.She worked in Antwerp in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and a mere forty paintings have been attributed to her. Her still lifes – banquets, fish platters and bouquets – are a feast for the eye. But what is their deeper meaning? What was the value of Chinese porcelain to a middle-class household in 1610? What made her combine an artichoke with other delicacies and exquisite objects? Clara Peeters: Dinner is served! sets out to answer these and other questions evoked by the sometimes enigmatic work of this fascinating artist.
This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Prado Museum in Madrid.
The exhibition will move to the Prado in the autumn.
POWER FLOWER, Foral still lifes in the Netherlands
Exhibition runs 28 November 2015 to 28 March 2016
BAN PowerFlower 270x330The Rockox House and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) are organising a series of small-scale exhibitions as part of the Golden Cabinet initiative. Power Flower, Floral still life in the Low Countries is the fifth in the series.
Since time immemorial, art in Flanders, Brabant and Holland has been characterised by incisive observation of nature and the quest for naturalness.
Despite that, until into the 16th century, plants and flowers were only to be seen adorning the margins of illustrations depicting saints in books of hours. The flourishing interest in the botanical world and the burgeoning fondness for things natural prompted early-seventeenth-century artists to regard bouquets of flowers as a self-contained motif.
It was a period in which artists were totally spellbound by the 'Power Flower' and were to be for many years to come. Jan Brueghel, Jan Davidz De Heem, Osias Beert, Daniël Seghers, Rachel Ruysch are just some of the many artists on proud floral display at this most sweet-scented of exhibitions.
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Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), under the spell of classical antiquity
Open: 24 of April - 16 of August 2015
Tempe website v1Ortelius is generally recognised as having created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terarum (Theatre of the World), published in Antwerp in 1570. He is also believed to be the first person to have questioned the early historical maps, proposing instead that the continents had been joined together before drifting apart to their current position. Ortelius also had a passionate interest in the history of classical antiquity and Biblical history.
In his first edition of the Theatrum, he already refers to place names in antiquity, and this subsequently results in a separate publication in 1587, the Thesaurus Geographicus. And again in his Parergon, a collection of his historical maps that he had previously published in various editions of the Theatrum, he portrays ancient history, sacred and secular, and shows the extent of the Roman Empire in Europe. With the help of his celebrated museum collection, including an extensive library and rich array of Roman coins, he reconstructed - among other things – Caesar’s conquest of Gall, and the journeys of Odysseus, Aeneas and the Argonauts. And in the texts which accompanied his maps, he always listed the sources he used.
Ortelius also literally travelled in search of history. That he visited Italy is borne out by his celebrated Itinerarium per nonnullas Galliae Belgicae partes. But also closer to home, he came looking for traces of classical antiquity in Tongeren, Trier and Metz. Towards the end of his life, he was preparing the publication of the Tabula Peutingeriana, a copy of a map of the road network across the Roman Empire dating originally from the 3rd or 4th century.
He was also a keen numismatist, and his collection included coins dating back to the latter years of the Roman Empire. Coins, and especially Roman coins, brought to life the history of those times, and his Deorum dearumque capita ex antiquis numismatibus Abrahami Ortelii geographi Regis collecta was published in 1573. For Ortelius, history and cartography went hand in hand. For him, geography was ‘the eye of history’.
It is not without reason, therefore, that Ortelius with his passion for the history of classical antiquity, finds his place in the Rockox House. Rockox (1560-1640) and Ortelius (1527-1598) were friends. They shared a passion for collecting coins. Rockox had all Ortelius’s major publications in his library, and a portrait of Ortelius hung in Rockox’s own ‘art room’ (or gallery).
This exhibition will include a range of these historical maps together with some printed works showing Ortelius’s reconstructions. Visitors will be able to follow how Ortelius collected his knowledge and then visualised it in map book form.This exhibition in the Rockox House is a joint venture with the Plantin-Moretus Museum / Print Collection in Antwerp, co-organised by Dr Dirk Imhof, curator of the Plantin-Moretus Museum and Hildegard Van de Velde, curator of the Rockox House Museum.
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The Parrot. 't Cierlijk schoon van haare veeren*
* The decorative beauty of its plumage
8 November 2014 – 22 February 2015
Peter Paul Rubens, The Holy family with parrot (detail), ©KMSKA, photo: Rik Klein Gotink
As part of The Golden Cabinet season, the Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts and the Rockox House Museum are organising a number of small-scale exhibitions. The Parrot is the third such exhibition in the series.
Following the stunning restoration of The Holy Family with the Parrot by P.P. Rubens (KMSKA), a work that has been given pride of place in 'The Golden Cabinet' exhibition, we are turning our attention to the parrot in the pictorial art of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its magnificent plumage was a feast for the eye and a source of inspiration for countless artists. 'Beauty', 'wisdom', 'virginal', 'exotic' and 'lover' are just a few of the many predicates assigned to this bird.
Besides Rubens' work, interpretations of the parrot by Savery, Fijt, Jordaens, de Heem, Dürer, Schongauer and other artists will also be on display.