The Musée de Besançon deals with German Renaissance painting in relation to its collections.
As a result of its history - Franche-Comté was part of the Holy Roman Empire from the 11th to the 13th century, and again from 1493 to 1678 - Besançon now has a significant collection of both paintings and graphic arts, thanks to successive donations made to the city. The exhibition explores the notions of geographical and symbolic boundaries between the private, public and religious spheres, and will feature works not only by the great masters but also by anonymous artists - the still-visible mysteries of centuries gone by, when people worked in workshops, guilds and networks. The exhibition has been conceived and designed to share this knowledge with a wide range of audiences.
The exhibition at the Musée de Besançon features 70 works from the German Renaissance. This tight, demanding corpus highlights the exceptional group of paintings by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), bequeathed by Jean Gigoux (1806-1894), which are masterpieces of the Besançon collections. Regular visitors to the museum will have the opportunity to see them again in a different display and from a new perspective. The exhibition also features loans from partner institutions: the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Louvre, the Petit-Palais, the Château de Versailles, the Musée Marmottan, as well as numerous regional institutions such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy, Dunkerque, Strasbourg, Autun, Grenoble, Nîmes and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, the Fondation Bemberg in Toulouse, the Musée Joseph Déchelette in Roanne, the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai, the Musée Calvet in Avignon, the Musée d'Arts et d'Histoire in Chaumont, the Abbey in Chablis and the Church of Saint-Maurice in Usson.
