Frohes Neues Jahr

Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a young woman in profile, around 1475.



BOTTICELLI!



Invention of the Picture.


We bumped into our old friend, Sandro Botticelli, at the Bucerius Kunst Forum last Sunday in Hamburg.



Michael Owen, Portrait of a young woman in shadow, around 2012.

The closing years of the thirteenth century saw the beginning of a gentle revolution in Italian art - the depiction of real life in paintings - that, two hundred years later, would usher in the Renaissance.

We caught this wonderful exhibition just as it was finishing. The almost 40 paintings all came from a single collection, built by one man: Bernhard August von Lindenau (1779–1854). Lindenau's collection is still housed in the museum that he built for it, the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg.