Baroque at Teylers

Jul 16, 2021 to Nov 07, 2021

The Italian drawings in the collection of Teylers Museum are world-famous. They belong to the most important acquisition in the museum's history: the purchase in 1790 of several albums of drawings from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) and Roman nobleman Livio Odescalchi (1658–1713). Overnight, the brand-new museum came into possession of over 1700 drawings.

In this exhibition you see a selection of the finest Italian drawings from the 17th century – the age of the Baroque. For the most part they reflect Odescalchi's personal taste, who acted as patron to several artists and mainly bought contemporary art. He had a special fondness for landscape drawings and elaborate figure studies. Let yourself be swept away by the drama and emotion in the work of great Baroque artists such as Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Guercino, Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini.

This exhibition coincides with the publication of the catalogue of Italian drawings from the 17th and 18th centuries written and researched by Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken.

Symposium October 27

On October 27 we organized an online symposium. Van Tuyll, former chief curator of Teylers Museum and head of the department of prints and drawings in the Louvre, spent over twenty years researching this part of the collection, which consists of 900 drawings. In this online symposium, he presented the most significant findings of his research:

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), A child with his guardian angel, c. 1674, pen and brown ink, brush and brown ink, over black chalk on paper, 386 x 247 mm. Collection of Teylers Museum