Italian Baroque painting in Rome, stretched between two opposing aesthetic approaches  – naturalism and classicism – is presented from January 29, 2026, in an exhibition entitled “Idea of Beauty” at the Olomouc Archdiocesan Museum.
More than forty paintings and drawings from the 17th and 18th centuries chronologically illustrate the development of this theme: from naturalism, which depicted unembellished reality often emphasized by dramatic light and shadow (Cecco del Caravaggio, Caroselli), through the High Baroque, characterized by decorativeness and dynamic forms (Cortona, Mola), and its rival Classicism with its calm, balanced compositions and idealized figures (Maratti, Calandrucci), to Rococo with its characteristic lightness and playfulness (Trevisani, Pesci). Thematically, the selections of exhibition focuses on religious, mythological, and historical subjects; landscape painting and genre painting are not represented.

The exhibition features loans from public and private collections in Czech Republic and Slovakia. On display there are paintings from the Archdiocese of Olomouc, the Olomouc Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, from the collections of Prague Castle, from the Silesian Regional Museum, from the Museum in Bruntál, from the collection of Jiří Lobkowicz, from the former Šternberk collection, from a private collection in Prague, and also from the National Heritage Institute, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, the Bratislava City Gallery, the Slovak National Museum – Bojnice Museum, and the art collections of the Memorial of National Literature.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a Czech-English catalog with a comparative study on the theme of “Baroque Painting in Rome” and individual catalog entries presenting interesting—and in some cases little-known—paintings of Italian provenance from the early 17th to the mid-18th century.

The exhibition is available until April 19, 2026.

Read more: https://muo.cz/en/vystavy/idea-del-bello-the-idea-of-beauty/