Drawing Connections: Inside the Minds of Italian Masters
A Selection from the John Mica Collection
Precious and fragile, Old Master drawings reveal an artist's thought processes, working methods, and interactions with wealthy patrons. This exhibition showcases Italian drawings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, exploring a broad range of subject matter, mediums, and regional schools.
Drawing as an artistic practice developed in Italy alongside the evolution of papermaking in the early Renaissance. Throughout the Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods, drawing remained the foundation of every artist's training and practice. Artists from other European countries, and later, from the United States, journeyed to Italy to hone their skills and draw from the great works of the Renaissance and antiquity. From the fifteenth century, Italian drawings were closely guarded by artists as intellectual property and collected by discerning patrons. Today, Italian drawings provide a unique view into artists' workshops, illuminating how they studied the human form and the natural world and how they developed and executed compositions for paintings, sculpture, and architecture.
This exhibition, compiled from the collection of Congressman John Mica, includes secular and religious subjects and figure studies as well as architectural and landscape drawing and features works by masters including Luca Cambiaso, Agostino Carracci, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
The exhibition is guest curated by Dr. Kimberly Dennis, Professor of Art History at Rollins, and students in the ARH 404 Museum Studies Practicum.
