Caravaggio and Bellini visit New York

A master of the early Renaissance and a master of the early Baroque together in New York: The Morgan Library & Museum presents two small exhibitions designed around two important loans from Italy. Giovanni Bellini’s »Pietà« Restored opens on January 15. The painting by Bellini (c. 1425-1516), who spent his entire creative career in Venice, is on loan from the Museo della Città in Rimini. It is being exhibited in the US for the first time ever and is also the first presentation after a comprehensive restoration. Unlike other angelic Pietàs, a motif dating back to the 13th century, the angels do not weep as they hold Christ's body, but appear sad and pensive. Bellini's break with tradition was taken up by subsequent painters and became widely popular. The exhibition also features works by Hans Memling, Perugino, and Antonio Rossellino, among others.

One day later, on January 16, the exhibition Caravaggio’s »Boy with a Basket of Fruit« in Focus opens in the same building. On loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, it is one of the earliest and best-known works by the famous painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). The exhibition examines the various influences of other painters such as Simone Peterzano and Giuseppe Cesari on the young master and explains Caravaggio's capacity for originality. His works of art were tantamount to small revolutions in Italian painting. The lascivious posture of the young man in the painting, the realism, is a far cry from the idealized representations that were typical at the end of the 16th century. Here, as in other works, Caravaggio revealed the fiction of art by reflecting the imperfection of the real world in his paintings.

Both exhibitions end on April 19.