Exhibition - Colour, glory and beauty.  

Germanic Paintings in French Collections (1420-1540)
From 4 May to 23 September 2024, the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie in Besançon, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, in partnership with the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), are presenting a three-part exhibition devoted to German painting from 1370 to 1550. Nearly 200 works from French collections will be on display, tracing the richness of this production. Alongside great masters such as Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer, the exhibition is also an opportunity to discover lesser-known works and artists.
The exhibition at the Musée Unterlinden
The Musée Unterlinden's collection of early paintings focuses mainly on art in Colmar during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The exhibition, thanks to generous loans from museums and churches, places it in the wider geographical context of the Upper Rhine: this territory, which corresponds more or less to present-day Alsace, stretches along both sides of the Rhine, from the Vosges to the Black Forest, and from Strasbourg in the north to Basel in the south; it is home to wealthy, economically dynamic cities that were all major centres of artistic production: Basel, Colmar, Freiburg im Breisgau and Strasbourg.
The Colmar section of the exhibition sets out to answer the many questions that today's visitors might have about such works: how were they produced in the 15th and 16th centuries? What functions did these paintings, now considered works of art, serve? What was the nature of the relationship between the painters and their patrons? Visitors are then invited to explore the stylistic aspects of the works, to understand the specific characteristics of each production centre, and even of each studio, and the changes that took place over time in the tastes of the commissioners and the proposals of the artists.