Before There Was Spiderman, Sarkozy, And The Movies; There Was Dionysus, Sultan Sulaiman, And The Fine Art Of Travel Printing

Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travels on Paper 1450–1700

May 6 through September 16, 2007

National Gallery of Art, West Building, Ground Floor, Washington, D.C.

This exhibition takes us back to a time when European artists depicted real and imagined places and distributed their marvelous images to an intensely curious audience in the only way possible—through prints on paper. The exhibition presents more than 60 printed works documenting mythological and fanciful travel, pilgrimages to holy sites, and voyages of discovery to real, faraway places. A highlight is The Ways and Fashions of the Turks (1553), by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a 16-foot-long panorama of a trip to Constantinople.
















Procession of Sultan Sulaiman at Atmeidan (detail), from "Customs and Fashions of the Turks," drawn 1533, published 1553
Pieter Coecke van Aelst ( Netherlandish, 1502–1550)
Woodcut; sheet 11 5/8 x 32 3/4 in. (29.5 x 83.2 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928 (28.85.7a,b)

[Click on image for enlargement.]

Image credit: (c) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. With thanks.

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