Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, “Rejecting Nothing, Selecting Nothing, and Scorning Nothing”

Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters is the first major international exhibition to assemble works by England’s nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the medieval and Renaissance masterpieces that inspired them. Through important loans of paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts from international collections, as well as more than 30 works drawn from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the exhibition  — which continues until September 30, 2018 — will demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelites’ fascination with Italian masters, including Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, and Paolo Veronese, as well as northern Renaissance painters such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.

“This exhibition is a remarkable curatorial accomplishment,” says Max Hollein, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums. “Never before have extraordinary masterpieces such as Botticelli’s Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Simonetta Vespucci), Raphael’s Self Portrait, and Van Eyck’s The Annunciation been displayed with Pre-Raphaelite treasures including Mariana by John Everett Millais, The Lady of Shalott by William Holman Hunt, and Bocca Baciata by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Loans from major museum collections in Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the United States have been gathered to explore how the renegade Pre-Raphaelites, represented by their most beloved works, engaged with the art of the past. The subject of how artists relate to their predecessors is eternal and one that still very visibly consumes artists of our own time.”