Before photography, engraving tells the story of Italian art

Before photography and modern printing, the power of images was expressed through copper, paper, and the printing press. Engravings produced in Italian courts between the Renaissance and Baroque periods were one of the main tools for disseminating European visual culture: images of rulers, political allegories, mythological scenes, ephemeral displays, and public celebrations circulated between cities and courts, contributing to building prestige, propaganda, and memory. Myth, Allegory, and Celebration, organized by the National Museum of Western Art, explores this iconographic universe through prints, engravings, and graphic works dedicated to the culture of Italian courts between the 16th and 17th centuries. The project focuses on how the printed image contributed to the construction of the European political and artistic imagination in a period marked by competition between dynasties, cities, and states. The exhibition traverses the great centers of Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture, from Venice to Rome, from Florence to Mantua, connecting art, public celebration, and the symbolic construction of power. Allegories of virtue, military triumphs, court festivities, ceremonial displays, and mythological scenes demonstrate how figurative culture was closely linked to the representation of political authority. A key aspect of the exhibition focuses on the function of engravings as tools for the international circulation of images. Many works reproduced paintings, frescoes, and decorations now lost, contributing to the dissemination of Italian artistic models throughout Europe. Through printmaking, figurative languages ​​developed in Italian courts reached collectors, artists, and intellectuals far beyond the country's borders. The project also engages with the permanent collection of the National Museum of Western Art, which preserves important collections of Italian art from the Renaissance to the 18th century. Works by artists such as Paolo Veronese, Giovanni Paolo Panini, and Bartolomeo Manfredi demonstrate the central role of Italian visual culture in shaping the Japanese museum's collection.