WeekendTuner Guided Tours

09/12/2018

WeekendTuner team visited Nürnberg! At the Germanisches Natiinalmuseum we were happy to see the original of the self-portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn.

10/11/2018

Have you already seen, or are you planning to see, the new movie about van Gogh?
https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/gyezym/julian-schnabel-van-gogh-biopic

Willem Dafoe won best actor at the Venice Film Festival for his bravura impression of the lauded painter in Julian Schnabel’s latest film.

31/10/2018

We can see some familiar... err... faces?

19/10/2018

How Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” gets us closer to understanding one of the unresolved mysteries of physics, and the brain mechanisms behind the magic of Impressionists’ light.

“In a period of intense suffering, Van Gogh was somehow able to perceive and represent one of the most supremely difficult concepts nature has ever brought before mankind.”

11/10/2018

The new exhibition “National Trust — Dutch Masters from British Country Houses” at the Mauritshuis (The Hague) brings together, for the first time outside of UK, 22 masterpieces of the Dutch Golden Age owned by British private collectors.
Just in case you have some motivation left after checking out The Girl with the Pearl Earring 😉
https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/discover/exhibitions/national-trust/

09/10/2018

The first kind of knowledge ('imagination') says it's a portrait of Spinoza. The second kind ('reason') says it's likely a forgery or a mislead attribution. But what does the third kind ('intuition') say? ;)

Portrait of a man in front of a sculpture | Barend Graat, 1666 | Private collection.

Because of its striking resemblance to the face of the Dutch-Jewish thinker Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, an early figure of the Enlightenment and author of the treatise "Ethics" (1677), as it was pictured on the old Dutch 1,000 gulden note, this painting has been—questionably—identified as the only portrait of Spinoza during his lifetime. True or false? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/portrait-one-worlds-most-influential-philosophers-180960164

27/09/2018

Today is World Tourism Day, and we’re celebrating all travelers with Johannes Vermeer’s Geographer (Städelsches Kunstinstitut | Frankfurt, Germany)—a rare example of a signed and dated painting by Vermeer, and one of the only two male portraits he left.

Sometimes considered a pendant to the artist’s Astronomer (Louvre | Paris, France), the Geographer might represent the same person—Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch businessman and scientist of the Golden Age, the inventor of the microscope and a friend of Vermeer’s. However, rather than a portrait of a specific person, it is a so-called tronie: the depiction of a social role, of a character, a type. A scientist in his study was a common topic of Dutch paintings of the 17th c.—a time of overwhelming discoveries that fascinated travelers, scholars, and common people alike. The Golden-Age Netherlands were not just a land of merchants and artists; Dutch cities counted among the most vibrant intellectual centers in Europe. Scientists and scholars belonged to the elite of the society—the circle in which Vermeers found his clients.

The Geographer seems to be tracing a route on a map. The terrestrial globe behind him, published in 1618 in Amsterdam by the Hondius family of cartographers—the same who made the celestial globe featured in the Astronomer—is turned toward the Indian Ocean, where the Dutch East India trading Company was then actively building a powerful Dutch commercial empire.

The Geographer is not focused on a book, like the scientist from a similar work by Gerrit Dou (Astronomer | J. Paul Getty Museum | Los Angeles, USA). The book seems to provide a starting point for his own reflexion: his eyes are narrowed, as if to indicate intense thinking. What about? Vermeer’s paintings never offer a single straightforward reading—hence the “mystery” he’s often quoted for. It is fair to assume that for him, science isn’t a work of mere description and calculation; it is a complex but gratifying spiritual effort of contemplation, reflexion, and imagination.

Johannes Vermeer, c. 1668-1669, oil on canvas | Städelsches Kunstinstitut | Frankfurt, Germany

29/01/2018

Family tour in Rotterdam at Boijmans van Beuningen. Love that museum! Here, the young participants pose in front of the portrait of Armand Roulin and show how they would love to be painted by Van Gogh.