I recently covered one of two major exhibitions on the Renaissance currently on view in Paris, “Inventing the Renaissance” at the Bibliothéque nationale de France. The second of these shows is just a short walk away at the Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde, inside the museum’s Al Thani Collection: “A Taste for the Renaissance,” which focuses on the period’s decorative arts. The exhibition is the product of a joint effort by the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Al Thani Collection. It is worth noting at the outset that the latter is owned by and named for Qatar’s ruling family, patrons of Hamas and proprietors of many of France and Britain’s luxury brands, banks, and sports teams. No wonder France’s pocket-sized president, prancing like an eager puppy begging his master for a pat on the head, recently welcomed a very tall Qatari sheik to the Champs-Elysées Palace.
Still, it is undeniable that the Al Thani space sparkles. The collection has rightfully been praised as a twenty-first-century version of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. Many of the pieces on display in “A Taste for the Renaissance” are very small—bringing a magnifying glass is a good idea. One such object is a hat badge of enameled gold, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, thought to be from 1550s Paris, executed in a style we now call Mannerist. It depicts the akedah, the sacrifice of Isaac. The painted scene presents Abraham with his axe lifted to execute his sole heir but shows the exact moment God’s angel swoops down to stay the father’s hand. The colors are rich, a delectable mix evoking cooked blueberries, fried egg, melting butterscotch, and steaming spinach.
In the Renaissance, astrology was considered a science, and those who today admonish us to “trust the science” have no right to sneer at it. The Arundel Zodiac (ca. 1540), an intaglio, depicts the full zodiac in gold, cornelian, rubies, and diamonds around a scene engraved by Marcantonio Raimondo (after Raphael) from the Aeneid. It was created for Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who took Jupiter for his emblem and celebrated the mysteries of the cosmos at his court’s Palazzo del Te. But the piece owes its name to Thomas Howard, Fourteenth Earl of Arundel, who purchased it in 1636 from a Flemish dealer.
The entirety of the show’s first room contains only objects from the Al Thani Collection; contributions from the V&A are scattered among more such objects throughout the rooms that follow. Notable among these is Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Forster III (1490–93), one of the artist’s notebooks with his famous reverse-coded writing. Also included is Donatello’s “Chellini Madonna”(ca. 1450), a treasure, beautifully portraying maternal love and playfulness. Donatello, then in his seventies, gave the bronze tondo to his doctor Giovanni Chellini in 1456. We also find in these rooms the bronze statute Meleager (ca. 1484–90) by Antico (Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi), which shows the titular hero spearing the Calydonian boar. The statue’s black patina brings out the folds of the hero’s tunic and his golden curls.
The V&A is also rich in English paintings, well represented here, that complement the Al Thani Collection’s ca. 1550 portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. The exhibition boasts several miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619), all from the V&A. The historian A. L. Rowse—who knew more about the Elizabethan era than any writer before or since—claimed in his 1950 book The England of Elizabeth that it was in the work of Hilliard (and his contemporary Isaac Oliver) that the era’s art reached its highest sensibility. Hilliard’s An Unknown Man (1600) depicts a short-bearded, knowing-looking man in an open shirt. He could almost belong to our century. The artist was the favorite painter of Elizabeth I, and his portrait of the queen in profile sits at the center of The Heneage Jewel (ca. 1595–1600) in a dazzling frame of enameled gold, cut diamonds, rubies, and rock crystal. Her Majesty appears suitably majestic, if solemn. An image of the piece has been plastered all over Paris as advertising for the exhibition, and fittingly so: it is an emblem of one of the world’s most glorious moments, excellently celebrated in this brilliant show.