Thirty of the works of the Italian Renaissance on display are coming from the museum’s own collection while the majority of the remaining eighty paintings are borrowed from Italian museums. Other borrowing partners are such prominent European museums as the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the National Gallery in London and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
A significant number of the paintings, drawings, graphics, sculptures and antiquities preserved in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts originate from Italy. More than one third of the Old Masters collection alone, comprising over one thousand items, are works by Italian masters, so it is just right to claim that the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts is one of the most important venues for Italian culture outside Italy.
This exhibition is showing a wide spectrum of Italian art. The masterpieces enable visitors to augment their knowledge about Italian painting based on the local collection. A prominent place is reserved for works by those great innovators who are not represented in the museum’s otherwise rich collection which fully documents individual schools and tendencies.
Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Lady With an Ermine, one of the master’s most famous paintings and one of just a handful of portraits of women, is among the highlights of the exhibition. The portrait is on loan from the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow and is insured for HUF 80 billion (295 million euro), or about four times the record auction price of USD 104 million for a painting (Pablo Picasso's Boy With Pipe, sold by Sotheby's, in 2004).
The teenage girl in the painting is likely Cecilia Gallerani, who was the mistress of Milan's ruler Lodovico Sforza il Moro, da Vinci's patron. It was probably painted in his early thirties, between 1482 and 1485, about 20 years before the Mona Lisa, and shows his sitter for the first time in a pose that would soon become the standard. Art historians say it is the world's first modern-age portrait ever painted, according to the Czartoryski Museum.
In the recent past there have been two exhibitions in Hungary that provided a comprehensive viewing of a country through its masterpieces. The exhibition El Greco, Velázquez, Goya. Masterpieces of Five Centuries of Spanish Painting was staged in spring 2006. Works were borrowed from several German museums and in addition from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Prado in Madrid. With its over 200,000 visitors the exhibition was
the ninth most frequented one displaying works in the world in 2006 by the old masters.
Two years earlier, by the end of 2004/beginning of 2005, another similar exhibition had been hosted by the Műcsarnok Museum: Light and Shade–Masterpieces, 400 Years of French Painting attracted 300,000 visitors.