MANIERA. Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence

2/24–6/5/2016
http://www.staedelmuseum.de/

Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Giorgio Vasari – in 2016, the Städel Museum will stage a major exhibition of superb works presenting the distinguished painters of Florentine Mannerism for the first time in Germany. With the aid of prominent loans, the show will acquaint the public with a key chapter in the history of Italian art in all its diversity. Spanning the period from the return of the Medici to Florence in 1512 and the initial artistic endeavours of the new generation around Pontormo and Rosso to the 1568 publication of Vasari’s Lives – artist biographies that still bear an influence today –, “Maniera” will be devoted to Florence as the first centre of European Mannerism.

More than 120 precious loans, including paintings as well as drawings and sculptures, will provide an unprecedented overview of a stylistically formative epoch for which the art historiographer Giorgio Vasari coined the colourful term “maniera”. Elegant, cultivated and artificial, but also capricious, extravagant and sometimes even bizarre: the art of Mannerism exhibits many facets. In 1967, the art historian John Shearman summed it up in a catchy formula – “the stylish style”. Its sophisticated grace and creative tenacity make the “maniera” one of the most fascinating phenomena in the art of Italy.

MASTERWORKS IN DIALOGUE. Eminent Guests for the Anniversary

10/7/2015–1/24/2016
http://www.staedelmuseum.de/

The fascinating and inspiring comparisons will – both in terms of contents and space – encompass all collections of the Städel Museum: visitors will come upon temporary “partnerships” in about eighty selected places throughout the house to be explored for three and a half months. Jan van Eyck’s “Annunciation” (c. 1434/36) will fly in from Washington, for example, and meet with the master’s “Lucca Madonna” (1437) that resides in the Städel. The two paintings, which rank among the most beautiful and, as regards their contents, most complex Madonnas of the most famous Early Netherlandish artist, were part of the splendid old masters collection of William II, King of the Netherlands, until 1850.

The confrontation of Edgar Degas’s “Musicians in the Orchestra” (1872–1876) with his “Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera ‘Robert Le Diable’” (1876) reveals a common ground in terms of both contents and motifs, in particular in regards to the depicted relationship between orchestra and dancers. Bringing together loans such as “Geschlecht mit Klößen (Sex with Dumplings)”, (1963) with paintings from the collection of the Städel Museum like “Acker (Field)”, (1962) elucidates the painter Georg Baselitz’s early work as a crucial position in the history of German twentieth-century painting. The Department of Prints and Drawings will also be visited by works of Elsheimer, Goltzius, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and others