Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka - Gemäldegalerie - Berlin
The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin presents Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka, an exhibition of around 90 masterworks that places portraits from different centuries, regions and cultures side by side. Drawn mainly from the Gemäldegalerie's own collection, with loans from the Alte and Neue Nationalgalerie, the Egyptian Museum and the Sculpture Collection, it spans portraiture from the 15th to the 20th century.
The unexpected pairings reveal how portraits speak to one another across time: Botticelli's Giuliano de' Medici beside a portrait by Tamara de Lempicka, or Sofonisba Anguissola's portrait of her mother beside Eugen Spiro's portrait of his wife. Identity, beauty, status and power run through the exhibition, linking each individual likeness to the social order of its time.
Four sections guide the visit. Portrait Types North and South of the Alps looks at the Renaissance prototypes of the genre; Self-Representation of the Elite shows how clothing, pose and scale signalled rank, in works by Anthonis Mor and Giambattista Moroni; Family, Friendship and Intimacy turns to private portraits; and Portraits of Art Collectors and Artists explores how painters such as Titian, Rembrandt, Anna Dorothea Therbusch and Anton Graff presented themselves.
Bringing together names such as Dürer, Holbein, Rubens, Velázquez and Gainsborough, the exhibition also holds up a mirror to today's image culture, asking how identity is shaped in the age of the selfie and social media. Go to Website
