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player ready...Name: Larry Feinberg
Position: Curator, Art Institute of Chicago
Years: 11
A major art exhibit doesn’t just appear in a museum’s galleries. Someone has to come up with the idea for the exhibit, obtain the works of art, and organize their presentation. For the Art Institute of Chicago’s current exhibit, “The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence,” that someone is Larry Feinberg. A Northwestern University graduate, Feinberg earned his master’s degree and doctorate in art history at Harvard. He also worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Feinberg gave Behind the Scenes a guided tour of the exhibit and talked about the task of assembling the 200 works of art in it, many of which had never traveled outside of Florence, Italy before they came to Chicago.
In exhibit room number four, dedicated to portraits and religious paintings:
What I wanted to do here was re-create one of the great rooms in the Uffizi Gallery, which is like the Louvre of Florence. We’ve tried to suggest that room with the wall colors, the blue wainscoting. Also the room is octagonal, so by angling the walls here, we were trying to suggest an octagon.
I talked it over with the designer, and I said because we have this set of masterpieces that speak to each other very well, it would be nice to group them together. It’s a nice way of grouping them together, seeing the nobility that they suggest.
By the two Jacopo Zucchi paintings:
These paintings, which come from the Borghese Gallery in Rome, almost didn’t make it here because of a bureaucratic snafu. Somebody, somewhere, put the wrong date on an export license. I had to get in touch with the Italian ambassador to the U.S., Ferdinando Salleo. He’s been very supportive of the Art Institute, and overnight he had somebody somewhere do something and it was taken care of, and this was three weeks before the show opened.
Q. How did this exhibit come about?
A. I wanted for some time to do a show like this and had been in conversations with Marco Chiarini, who was then the director of the Pitti Gallery in Florence. At the same time, my colleague Alan Darr at the Detroit Institute of Arts [co-organizer of the exhibit] was talking to him as well. So in the end, Marco put the two of us together, and the three of us became curators of the exhibit.
Q. How did you get all the art for the exhibit?
A. You do a lot of networking. You have to be a bit of a salesman to convince people that a show is going to be important enough to get them to loan their masterpiece to it. The majority of the pieces in the show have never left Florence before. The big Michelangelo [the “Apollo/David” sculpture] has never left Florence. The Studiolo pieces have never left Florence. It was just a number of meetings in Florence with all the people involved in making decisions, explaining to them why we felt it was crucial to the show . . . I’m sure that Feb. 3–after it closes–I’ll suffer some post-partum depression.
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“The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence” continues through Feb. 2 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. Call 312-443-3600, or visit artic.edu.