The gradual opening of the National Gallery continues, with the opening of the periodical exhibition hall (“Antonios E. Komninos Foundation” Hall) in the basement of a total area of 2000 sq.m. of the renovated National Gallery.
The first exhibition it hosts is entitled “In Search of Immortality. The art of portrait in the Louvre collections “and welcomes the public from November 30. By the end of the year, the wing with the permanent collections of Western European art is expected to be fully opened, where, according to the director of the National Gallery, Picasso’s stolen painting “Female Head” will be exhibited.
With a first look at the exhibition from the Louvre collections, as the search for immortality is feverishly set up, through the imprinting of the human face, it starts from the depths of antiquity, going through centuries of art history. From the mask of a Pharaoh mask and the realistic portrait of Fayum, to the sculptural portrait of Hammurabi, the first great legislator, king of Babylon, to the sculptures of the Greco-Roman period with the figures of power, Alexander the Great (copy from the bust of Lysippos) Trajan until the posthumous “Portrait of the Duke of Orleans” by Engr. From the predominance of Christianity and the overlap of the individual, the emergence of the human form passes triumphantly in the Renaissance to the kings and nobles of the ostentatious Baroque period.
The exhibition is divided into 13 thematic sections based mainly on the social function of the portrait in each era, and not in chronological order.
The environment it forms includes valuable small crafts of the French Middle Ages, the portrait in portable form for personal use. A special section are the portraits of women in power from the time of the Pharaohs to Marie Antoinette and Madame de Pompadour. Great masters of art such as Velasquez, Rembrandt, Veronese, Goya, Reynolds, David, Delacroix, etc., the masterpiece of Antoine Jean Groe “Napoleon crosses the Bridge of Arcoli” and later the funeral mask of Napoleon 100 exhibits from the Louvre collections.
At its core, the French curators highlight the “Power of the Spirit”, with sculptures by the Enlightenment philosophers Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot talking to the archetypal bust of Homer. The exhibition refers to the French Revolution with Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting “The Death of Mara”, as a witness to the freedom of the new era.
In the first press conference in the renovated building and in the aftermath of the anniversary exhibition in the Louvre for the 200 years of Greek Independence, the director of the National Gallery Marina Lambraki-Plaka spoke about the rationale of periodic exhibitions in the new Gallery “with two in numerous smaller ones “and for the” first significant exhibition – tribute of the new National Gallery to a big foreign brother, such as the Louvre with multiple traditional ties between France and Greece “. The idea of the Portrait exhibition in the Louvre collections, started four years ago in collaboration with Mrs. Plaka with the then director of the Louvre Jean-Luc Martinez, she stressed.
The cooperation with French museums will continue in the future, a fact that the Deputy Minister of Contemporary Culture Nikolas Giatromanolakis assured, welcoming the exhibition. “The involvement of the Ministry of Culture in the National Gallery is not completed with the delivery of the expansion project, on the contrary, it is starting now. It was a matter of time before the National Gallery opened according to the prime minister’s schedule and it was done. The building was donated to the public. In order to operate, however, it must have staff, acquire an organizational chart and, together with its branches, meet its role in the 21st century “, assured Mr. Giatromanolakis.
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