Capture the Senses: Attraction and Horror in Early Modern Art

This focused exhibition draws directly from the Haggerty Museum’s extensive holdings of Early Modern art to investigate how artists’ creations inspire delight and terror, often simultaneously. Featuring artworks made in Europe and the Americas between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the exhibition takes a close look at images that join aesthetic pleasure to terrifying subject matter. Works by artists including Albrecht Dürer, Ferdinand Bol, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Francesco Solimena, take up such complex and unsettling issues as the end times, human sacrifice, the decay of empire, and the burden of knowing one’s own fate.  

The paintings, prints, and sculpture featured here reflect a period of artmaking, particularly in Europe, when lifelikeness became newly important to the visual arts. This broad turn was propelled both by new methods of rigorous inquiry into nature and by religious reforms that sought to stir sentiment by grounding scenes of sacred history in the sensations of lived experience. Artists, accordingly, marshalled the resources of color, composition, and, often, the violent disruptions of life to appeal to viewers’ sense of reality and elicit compelling psychological responses.  

“Capture the Senses” was curated by Kirk Nickel, PhD, Haggerty Museum Curator of European Art.  

Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the Eleanor H. Boheim Endowment Fund and in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.  

Image: Attributed to Nicolas Baudesson, French, 1611 - 1680, “Still Life with Flowers”, Mid 17th century, Oil on panel, 24 1/4 x 32 inches, 66.11, Gift of Ms. Paula Uihlein, Collection of the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University