“These ideas of the Renaissance go with them, but the framework is all gone, so they start twisting the ideas,” Rassieur said. Artists started manipulating perspective, and realism gave way to imagination.
Curator Frederick Ilchman, chairman of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and scholar of later Renaissance art, noted the curiosity of Rassieur’s show.
“People talk about exceptions all the time, like one oddity that doesn’t really fit into the schema,” Ilchman said. “But Tom is saying: wait, time out ― it’s a larger trend. It may even represent a shift.”
The show at times pairs a classic Renaissance print with a “weird one,” or just lets the weirdness shine on its own.
In the 16th century “Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus” by Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael, many classic Renaissance elements are at play. (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
A classic Renaissance scene plays out in Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael’s collaborative 16th-century engraving “Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus.” In the engraving, muses surround Apollo as he plays a lyre, and poets of different eras, including Greek Homer, Roman Virgil and Tuscan Dante, gather together.
But then 30 years later, an engraving shows up, and it’s unclear who made it. However, the structure looks similar to the previous work, especially the trees and size.