'The Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem' de la Sibiu la Paris

Flemish and Italian paintings accumulated in the 19th century by a Hapsburg official part of the Brukenthal exhibition from Sibiu, Romania at the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris.

December 14, 2009

In Paris, a Great Collection Comes Out of Hiding

By CLAUDIA BARBIERI

For decades, art that was behind the Iron Curtain stayed behind the Iron Curtain. But it turns out that under the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, some extraordinary pockets of history and culture survived in hiding. One of these is the Brukenthal collection from Romania, on view at the Jacquemart-André Museum through Jan. 11.

The collection encompasses an extraordinary wealth of 15th- to 17th-century Flemish and Italian paintings accumulated in the 19th century by a Hapsburg official. A sample of 45 of these paintings is currently on show at the museum, following their almost accidental discovery last year by the museum’s curator, Nicholas Sainte Fare Garnot.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said Mr. Sainte Fare Garnot of the treasures he found on a scouting exhibition to Sibiu, Romania, with the Belgian art historian Jan de Maere. Showing for the first time outside that country, the exhibition includes stunning works by the Breughels, elder and younger; Memling; Van Eyck; and others.

Baron Samuel von Brukenthal, a court favorite of the Empress Marie-Thérèse and governor of Transylvania, started his collection after Marie-Thérèse gave him his first painting, “Soldier at the Window Smoking a Pipe,” by Frans Van Mieris. Also included in the show is an exquisitely surreal Flemish painting from the museum’s own collection, “Allegory of Virtue,” in which a Madonna, emerging from a jagged rock, is protected by two lions prowling in the foreground.

But the real crowd-stopper in the show is a “Massacre of the Innocents,” painted sometime in the late 1580s in the studio of Pieter Breughel the Elder, after his death. Cruel and violent, but painted with extraordinary verve and detail, the painting is a biting commentary on the repression of the Dutch by the Spanish Inquisition.

http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/in-paris-a-great-collection-comes-out-of-hiding/?scp=3&sq=romania&st=cse