Cultural Event #1

Cities of Splendor: A Journey through Renaissance Italy at the Denver Art Museum travels through Florence, Milan, Mantua, Siena, Venice and even explores the cultural impact Across the Alps in countries such as Germany and Spain. It was a great way to show off the Denver Art Museum’s Samuel H. Kress Foundation collection, which is truly breathtaking. The show is meant to be the viewer’s “passport” through 15^th and 16^th century Italy. The associate curator is Angelica Daneo, who also teaches a Renaissance art history class at the University of Denver. She provided her class with private access to the exhibition and to the head conservator James Squires, who talked about some of the stabilizing and conservation efforts he and his team went through to prepare the pieces for display. It begins with stabilizing the relative humidity in the downstairs gallery where the exhibition would take place. Stable relative humidity for the show is 50% +/- 5%. The most important thing is to keep the humidity stable and not fluctuate by more than 2% in one day. Some of the pieces, including Albrecht Dürer’s engravings Prodigal Son and Madonna and Child are in microclimates, which look like small clear plastic boxes. They provide a very important purpose though, to further stabilize the environments of the incredibly delicate materials. The conservation of the pieces is what I found most intriguing during my visit to the exhibition. I especially loved the aforementioned Dürer engravings, Prodigal Son and Madonna and Child.