72 works from the Prado, the Rijksmuseum and 15 other lenders (including the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), the exhibition offers a reflection on the traditions of painting in Spain and the Netherlands. While the art-historical literature has considered these traditions to be essentially different, the exhibition juxtaposes the historical myths and artistic realities of these two artistic centers to reflect on their many shared traits.
The idea that art produced in different parts of Europe is markedly different: that Velázquez, for example, is “very Spanish” e Rembrandt “very Dutch”, is based on the excessive influence that the nationalist mentalities and ideologies of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries have had on our way of understanding art. Scholars of that period attached enormous importance to the idea that each nation had a different national character, which made it widely known that these differences manifested themselves in the art of each country. This perspective worked to downplay the traits shared by European artists.
The case of seventeenth-century Spanish and Dutch painting is symptomatic of this. Separated by a war, the art of these countries has traditionally been interpreted as the opposite. Nonetheless, the legacy of Flemish and Italian painting, whose influence defined all European art, was similarly interpreted in the two places. In the 17th century both countries saw the emergence of an aesthetic which moved away from idealism and which focused on the real look of things and how to represent it. In their works, the artists represented in this exhibition have not expressed the essence of their nations, but rather shaped the ideas and approaches they have shared with an international community of creators.
