"The first major exhibition in forty-five years devoted to the Burgundian Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) brings together Gossart's paintings, drawings, and prints and places them in the context of the art and artists that influenced his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode. Gossart was among the first northern artists to travel to Rome to make copies after antique sculpture and introduce historical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of northern painting. Most often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into northern European art of the early sixteenth century, he is the pivotal Old Master who changed the course of Flemish art from the Medieval craft tradition of its founder, Jan van Eyck (ca. 1380/90-1441), and charted new territory that eventually led to the great age of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). "
„In August 1617 a small group of Saxon nobles gathered in Castle Hornstein near Weimar to establish a type of institution previously unknown on German soil ‚the learned society'. It was based on the Italian model of the previous century and specifically on the Academia della Crusca of Florence, to whose ranks one of its founding members, Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen, had been elected in 1600. Ludwig was the chief benefactor and the head of this new German society until his death in 1650, and he and its other founding members sought inspiration in their pursuit of learning from the many Italian literary societies which had contributed so much to the purification and normalization of Italian letters in the sixteenth century. The new German society was called the ‚Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft', the Fruitbearing Society, and its motto was „Alles zum Nutzen" - ‚Everything for a purpose'".
"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines. From 1480 to 1650 Renaissance and Baroque (Early Modern) engravers made dramatic and rapid visual changes to the technique of engraving as they responded to the demands of reproducing artworks. ‚The Brilliant Line' follows these visual transformations and offers new insight intothe special inventiveness and technical virtuosity of Early Modern engravers."
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