Paris. Return match of a partnership between the National Gallery of Prague and the Louvre (after an exhibition devoted to mannerist engraving in Prague, during the summer of 2024, benefiting from many Parisian loans), “the experience of nature” is an exhibition that could have had a completely different face: “We had carte blanche for loans, we were offered large paintings of mannerist altars”recalls Philippe Malgouyres, co-commissioner of the exhibition with Olivia Savatier. But in the galleries of the Národní Galerie, the attention of the two conservatives of the Louvre finally paid on objects of much smaller sizes.
In the Richelieu gallery, this concise selection of a hundred pieces appears much more suitable for exhibition spaces in a row, and above all allows you to change the look on the subject treated. There is no reference to mannerism in this journey devoted to the arts under the reign of Rodolphe II, emperor of the German Roman Empire whose patron’s activity is associated with Nordic development in the manner of Tuscany.
The exhibition develops themes that are rather associated with the end of the 18th and 19th centuries: the rediscovery of nature and its observation, the influence of sciences on creation, a concern for truth and even a certain naturalism, opposite the tapered bodies of mannerist painters. A modern approach encouraged by this protective monarch of arts and sciences, which we discover portrait by Arcimboldo in an amalgam of fruit.
Erasmus Habermel (1538? Prague, 1606), sundial with equatorial circle, around 1600, golden and engraved brass, 38 & nbsp, x 26 & nbsp, x 26 & nbsp, cm, prague, uměleckoprůMyslové museum.
© Ondřej Kocourek / The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague
From the start of the exhibition, the dialogue between Arts and Sciences appears clearly in the miniatures painted by Joris Hoefnagel, small precision gems representing molluscs, birds and crustaceans. The artistic enterprise mixes here with the recent development of natural history: above each creature floats a small orange figure which refers to a legend, making these miniatures knowledge and classification tools, as much as small masterpieces.
The attraction for knowledge and observation is reflected in each object of the course: stone marquetry paintings representing a Praguois landscape, made with rocks found around the capital; the landscapes captured outdoors by artists, immortalizing subjects as banal as a water tower or a log camp; The stone cuts of the Ottavio Miseroni sculptor, which abandon symmetry to create organic forms.
The presentation of this artisto-scientific company is carried by strong museography and scenography choices: show few objects, and individualize them each, under a bell or on the picture rails, to make it a singular experience. The evocation of Kunstkammer (equivalent of studioloRodolphe II study cabinet proposed by the scenographer of the Louvre, Juan-Felipe Alarcon, also underlines the idea of a world which is gradually organized by science, and supports the will to make each object a spectacle. An important historical course, but whose designers have not forgotten the word “pleasure”.
