Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
TEN PAINTINGS NOT TO MISS
Battle of San Romano
Uccello.
Room 54
Arnolfini Portrait
Van Eyck. Room 56
Virgin of the Rocks
Da Vinci. Room 57
Venus and Mars
Botticelli. Room 58
The Ambassadors
Holbein. Room 4
Self-Portrait at the Age of 63
Rembrandt
van Rijn. Room 23
The Cornfield
Constable. Room 34
Rain, Steam & Speed
Turner. Room 34
Gare St Lazare
Monet. Room 43
Van Gogh's Chair
Van Gogh. Room 45
Next door, you can admire the extraordinarily vivid
Wilton Diptych
, one of the
few medieval altarpieces to survive the Puritan iconoclasm of the Commonwealth.
It was painted by an unknown fourteenth-century artist for King Richard II, who
is depicted kneeling, presented by his three patron saints to the Virgin, Child and
assorted angels.
Whatever you do, don't miss
Paolo Uccello
's brilliant, blood-free
Battle of San
Romano
, which dominates room 54. The painting commemorates a recent Florentine
victory over her bitter Sienese rivals
and was commissioned as part of a three-panel
frieze for a Florentine palazzo. Another Florentine commission - this time from the
Medicis - is
The Annunciation
by
Fra Filippo Lippi
, a beautifully balanced painting in
which the poses of Gabriel and Mary carefully mirror one another, while the hand of
God releasing the dove of the Holy Spirit provides the vanishing point.
Room 56 explores the beginnings of oil painting, and one of its early masters,
Jan van
Eyck
, whose intriguing
Arnolfini Portrait
is celebrated for its complex symbolism. No
longer thought to depict a marriage ceremony, the “bride” is not pregnant but simply
wearing a fashionable dress that showed off just how much excess cloth a rich Italian
cloth merchant like Arnolfini could afford.
Botticelli to Piero della Francesca
You return to the Italians in room 57, which boasts
Leonardo da Vinci
's melancholic
Virgin of the Rocks
(the more famous
Da Vinci Code
version hangs in the Louvre) and
two contrasting Nativity paintings by
Botticelli
: the
Mystic Nativity
is unusual in that it
features seven devils fleeing back into the Underworld, while in his
Adoration of the
Kings
, Botticelli himself takes centre stage, as the best-dressed man at the gathering,
resplendent in bright-red stockings and giving the audience a knowing look. In room
58 is his
Venus and Mars
, depicting
a naked and replete Mars in deep postcoital sleep,
watched over by a beautifully calm Venus, fully clothed and somewhat less overcome.
Further on, in room 62, hangs one of
Mantegna
's best early works,
The Agony in the
Garden
, which demonstrates a convincing use of perspective. Close by, the dazzling
dawn sky in the painting on the same theme by his brother-in-law,
Giovanni Bellini
,
shows the artist's celebrated mastery of natural light. Also in this room is one of
Bellini's greatest portraits of the Venetian Doge
Leonardo Loredan
. Elsewhere, there are
paintings from Netherlands and Germany, among them
Dürer
's sympathetic portrait of
his father (a goldsmith in Nuremberg), in room 65, which was presented to Charles I
in 1636 by the artist's home town.
Finally, at the far end of the wing, in room 66, your eye will probably be drawn to
Piero della Francesca
's monumental
Baptism of Christ
, one of his earliest surviving
pictures, dating from the 1450s and a brilliant example of his immaculate compositional
technique. Blindness forced Piero to stop painting some twenty years before his death,
and to concentrate instead on his equally innovative work as a mathematician.
The main building
The collection continues in the gallery's
main building
with paintings from the
sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. This account follows the collection
more or less chronologically.
