The Minneapolis Institute of Art is challenging conventional perceptions of Renaissance art with a groundbreaking exhibition that showcases the era's bizarre and surreal creations. "The Weirdening of the Renaissance," curated by prints and drawings curator Tom Rassieur, presents a collection of engravings, etchings, and woodcuts that reveal an unexpected side of the period traditionally known for realism and anatomical precision.
The exhibition features extraordinary works that defy typical Renaissance expectations, including a 16th-century engraving of a rhinoceros with scaly, lizard-like skin, mysterious scenes of witchy women and suspicious horses observing dead men, and tree trunks partially transformed into human figures engaged in wild sexual acts. These aren't modern internet memes, but authentic Renaissance-era prints that venture into the surreal and downright bizarre.
According to Rassieur, this artistic transformation began in 1506 when a Roman farmer discovered "Laocoön and His Sons," a marble sculpture from the Hellenistic era depicting sea serpents attacking a Trojan priest and his sons. "Suddenly these artists had this major, big sculpture that came from Antiquity but was full of energy. It wasn't symmetrical and it was this wild story," Rassieur explained. "That triggers this feeling of artistic license."
The movement gained momentum after the death of dominant High Renaissance artist Raphael in 1520, when his former assistants scattered across Europe. The situation was further complicated when Holy Roman Emperor Charles V attacked Rome in 1527, effectively dismantling the established art commissioning system. Artists fled to northern Italy and France, where they decorated the palace of Francis I, carrying Renaissance ideas with them but without the traditional framework.
"These ideas of the Renaissance go with them, but the framework is all gone, so they start twisting the ideas," Rassieur noted. "Artists started manipulating perspective, and realism gave way to imagination." This shift represents more than isolated artistic oddities, according to Frederick Ilchman, chairman of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a scholar of later Renaissance art.
"People talk about exceptions all the time, like one oddity that doesn't really fit into the schema," Ilchman observed. "But Tom is saying: wait, time out – it's a larger trend. It may even represent a shift." The exhibition strategically pairs classic Renaissance prints with their weird counterparts, or simply allows the strangeness to stand on its own.
One striking example of this juxtaposition involves Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael's collaborative 16th-century engraving "Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus," which depicts muses surrounding Apollo as he plays a lyre, with poets from different eras including Greek Homer, Roman Virgil, and Tuscan Dante gathering together. Thirty years later, an anonymous engraving appeared with similar structural elements but radically different content.
This later work, attributed to the mysterious "Master HFE," transforms the high-minded classical scene into something entirely different. "Instead of being a high-minded print asset, it's all about sex," Rassieur explained. "The people are having sex. The animals are having sex and the trees are having sex." The print, known as "Parnassus Profaned," exemplifies how artists took established Renaissance compositions and subverted them completely.
The low-lit second-floor gallery reveals additional Renaissance oddities at every turn. Master printmaker Albrecht Dürer's "Melencolia I" from 1514 reads like an intricate puzzle, featuring a grid with numbers that always add up to 34 in 34 different possible combinations. "It's an intellectual feat that is another unprecedented aspect of this image," Rassieur noted, highlighting how the work challenges traditional Renaissance artistic approaches.
Another remarkable piece, a bizarre etching attributed to Juste de Juste from around 1540-45, shows a pyramid of five men wobbling in strange balance. The etching was never intended for public consumption beyond a small circle of artists and was likely created purely for entertainment. The distorted figures pile on top of one another, their toes reaching each other in remarkably intimate ways, demonstrating how artists experimented with human anatomy in unprecedented ways.
All the works featured in the exhibition, which runs through November 30, are multiples rather than one-off paintings or sculptures. Each highly detailed print required painstaking creation in reverse, a technically demanding process that underscores the artists' commitment to their unconventional visions. "One can make the case that great art can be a multiple," Ilchman emphasized. "This is real art, these were painstakingly made."
The exhibition represents curator Tom Rassieur's effort to inject fun and surrealism into understanding the Renaissance era's classic forms. By showcasing these works together in a single-room exhibition, the Minneapolis Institute of Art promises to fundamentally change visitors' perceptions of Renaissance art, revealing a tradition of artistic experimentation and boundary-pushing that has largely been overlooked in favor of the period's more conventional masterpieces.
