Seeing 150 works by Donatello and his contemporaries should remind any visitor that for around a thousand years the only European art that mattered was religious.
The exhibition on “Spain and the Hispanic World” features an opulent vision of the Flight into Egypt by an unknown 18th-century Peruvian artist. The work is from the Hispanic Society of America. (photo: Lucien de Guise)
Like the proverbial big red London bus, you wait a long time for a Catholic-interest exhibition and two arrive at the same time. Today, half of London’s four major museums are focusing on Catholic culture, and both exhibitions are novel for their venues.
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition “Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance,” open through June 11, is the first U.K. exhibition to focus on this 14th-century pioneer of the Italian Renaissance. The exhibition title might credit only Donatello, but numerous contemporaries and followers are also on view.
The other exhibition, “Spain and the Hispanic World,” at the Royal Academy of the Arts through April 10, explores the art of Spain and its former colonies in the New World — all courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America. Based in New York, this is the greatest repository that exists of Spanish culture across continents.
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