A wall of epic paintings from the Barberini palace evokes power, prestige, and spiritual anguish — By Tim Gihring Two years ago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired four Italian paintings from the 1620s, all commissioned by the Barberini family at the height of their power and patronage. Until now, only two have been on display: a monumental depiction of the Archangel Michael defeating Satan, by…

How the few square inches of “Shiva and Parvati with Companions” contains multitudes — By Coco Banks One of most recently acquired objects at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is Shiva and Parvati with Companions, painted around 1810 in northern India: brilliantly colorful, full of minute details, and only slightly larger than a piece of letter paper. Currently on view in the museum’s rotunda…

One curator’s 15-year quest to recover the life and work of Fukuda Kodōjin, a legendary artist whose legacy was lost in the aftermath of World War II. — By Tim Gihring // Fifteen years ago, Andreas Marks had never heard of Fukuda Kodōjin. Hardly anyone had. Kodōjin, who was born in rural Japan in 1865, was among the last of the literati painters, a tradition of scholarship, poetry, and art that died with him in the wake of…

It’s one of the most famous paintings in the world: Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes. Now we know how a woman would paint it today. — By Diane Richard “It’s the only decapitation painting I did.” Not many living artists can claim that — paintings of beheadings not being, perhaps, as popular as they once were. Then again, not many living artists have a painting in the same gallery as Judith and Holofernes (1599) by Baroque…

An Oscar-winning art director had a vision for his show of ancient Chinese bronzes—and a problem only a teenager could solve — By Tim Gihring When Tim Yip was conceiving the look of “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes,” Mia’s multimedia show of delicately inscribed vessels made for archaic ceremonies, he suggested including fragments of objects at the outset of the exhibition. He didn’t suggest why. Yang Liu, Mia’s curator of Chinese art…

A Q&A on “Fragments of Epic Memory” — By Tim Gihring // In 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario purchased some 3,500 photographs of Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, taken between 1840 and 1940. They had been collected by Patrick Montgomery, an archivist in New York, and capture the changing lives, landscapes, and labor…

A mysterious painting, a curious curator, and the ancient adage that once explained the vagaries of romance — By Tom Rassieur “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence,” the exhibition recently held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, prominently featured a painting by Luca Signorelli (c. 1450–1523) with the title Allegory of Fertility and Abundance. Painted in various shades of gray, it resembles a relief sculpture carved in stone, its five…

The real story behind the mad, marvelous family that inspired the Italian Renaissance — By Tim Gihring It’s good to be the king. It’s good to be the queen, for that matter. But in Florence, Italy, in the 1400s and early 1500s, it was great to be the Medicis. …

Why Botticelli still matters (maybe more than ever) — By Tim Gihring A few weeks ago, as the long hot summer in Minnesota began to cool, I called up Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Galleries, in Florence, Italy. For six years, Schmidt had been the head of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at Mia. He is tall…