The exhibition invites the visitor to take a stroll through the European art from renaissance until baroque. Small and large format artworks highlight this development: While the oldest paintings reveal their heritage of the Late Middle Ages through choice of motifs and colors and mostly showing religious motifs, recent works represent the new freedom in painting.
This era is characterized by a changed self-understanding of the artists. Motifs which deemed to be unworthy before are now captured on canvas as a matter of course. Nature is gaining increasing importance and finally emancipates from her initial minor role. The everyday life of ordinary people becomes interesting, too. Artists set new standards while striving for the correct reproduction of anatomy, materiality, vividness and its coherent interplay of light and shadow as well as maximum illusion.
The museum shows religious and mythological scenes, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and paintings of the sea created by Dutch, French, Italian and German artists among them Lucas Cranach the Elder (Workshop) and the Brueghel Family.
