An exhibition on two major artists of the Venetian Renaissance, Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, opened yesterday evening at the National Gallery, attended by Ambassador Raffaele Trombetta. The exhibition, sponsored by the Italian Tourism Board, is in the gallery’s new Sainsbury Wing and comprises 90 works from museums around the world, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Querini Stampalia Foundation and Venetian museums. In recognition of Italy’s art heritage, explanatory rubrics are in both English and Italian. The exhibition will run until 19 January 2019.
Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell, the curator of the exhibition, explained that the exhibition is part of a series being run by the gallery on key figures in Italian art. Previous exhibitions in the series have included “Beyond Caravaggio” and “Michelangelo and Sebastian”, held in 2016-17. “Mantegna and Bellini” offers a rare occasion to compare and contrast major works by these two great artists and to discover how they influenced each other.
The next exhibition in this series will be on another illustrious 16th-century Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto, and will run from 5 November 2018 to 10 February 2019.
