MONTREAL, CANADA.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents "Italian Old Masters from Raphael to Tiepolo: The Collection of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts," on view through August 4, 2002. This  remarkable exhibition features masterworks of Italian painting by many of the most celebrated names associated with that nation’s artistic heritage. The exhibition, which encompasses all of the major schools of Italian art from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, includes forty-three illustrious works ranging in scale from intimate devotional subjects and portraits to state commissions, monumental altarpieces and mythological paintings.
 
This presentation of highlights from one of Europe’s greatest Italian Old Master collections - and one that has received limited exposure in North America - includes works by such renowned artists as Bernardo Bellotto, Annibale Carracci, Filippino Lippi, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano del Piombo, Raphael, Sebastiano Ricci, Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese. The exhibition is being mounted specifically for Montreal by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. After the collection’s three-month showing here, the precious paintings will return directly to Budapest. 

The earliest masterpiece is a large crucifix, cut to the shape of the Cross and figure of the crucified Christ, executed by a Florentine painter of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Monaco, whose works were often moving and lyrical. Among the most famous paintings in the exhibition is Raphael’s world-renowned Esterházy Madonna, named after the Hungarian aristocratic collectors who once owned it. This exquisite and intimate portrayal of the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John is set in a landscape of surpassing beauty. The rarely lent work, a transcendent treasure of the Budapest collection, was executed and left not quite finished by the master in 1508, when he left Florence for Rome. Passages of visible underpainting in this superbly conserved High Renaissance panel reveal Raphael’s masterful painting and drawing and provide insight into the methods he used to work up the composition. The exhibition features yet another intimate and tender study of the Madonna and Child by one of the finest Florentine painters of the late fifteenth century, Filippino Lippi. 

Titian was the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance and, with Raphael, one of the two greatest Italian portraitists of the age. His Portrait of Doge Marcantonio Trevisani is a model of his aggressive use of the brush to evoke, with the mastery of his mature style, the august power and authority of the subject. It is complemented by other elegant, sensual portraits by such Venetian luminaries as Sebastiano del Piombo and Veronese. The portrait of a man by sixteenth-century Brescian painter Romanino presents, by contrast, a more assertively naturalistic depiction of its handsome subject.