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Bernart van Orley. Brussels and Renaissance

Exhibition February 20 − May 26, 2019
This spring, in the framework of the jubilee year of Peter Bruegel the Elder, the BOZAR Center for Fine Arts in Brussels honors the sixteenth-century artist Bernart van Orley. He is one of Bruegel’s predecessors and key figures in the Brussels art scene in the Renaissance. His innovative style struck contemporaries, including the courts of Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary and Emperor Charles. Van Orley received prestigious orders for luxurious tapestries, paintings and stained glass windows.

At the exhibition“Bernart van Orley. Brussels and Renaissance for the first time in history, about a hundred works of the artist, collected from the largest collections of the world, have been collected. This is a unique opportunity for art lovers to explore the work of this Brussels master in the city where he was born. The exhibition sheds light on a wide range of topics and techniques, thanks to which the painter made a name for himself. The exhibits reveal the different manifestations of Bernart van Orley - from the head of the workshop, who solved everyday issues, to the court painter.

The focus is on two wall carpets from the “Hunting of Charles V” series, rented from the Louvre in Paris, and a tapestry from the “Battle of Pavia” series, borrowed from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. Of the two other collections came two exceptionally well-designed sketches for the now lost wall carpets commissioned by the court of Nassau.

On the occasion of the exhibition, for the first time in a long time, fragments that were once a single work were reunited. For example, this is the altar of St. John the Baptist from the Metropolitan Museum, which is now installed next to its second half, now stored in a private collection. Finally, the exhibition presents many works on paper by masters who influenced Bernart van Orley - Durer, Mantegna and Raphael.