Collection
Power & Politics in Renaissance & Baroque painting
41 paintings exploring the theme of power & politics, from artists including Anthony van Dyck, Francis Sandford, Francois de Poilly, Guido Reni and across institutions such as Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.
A Genealogical History of the Kings of England, and Monarchs of Great Britain, &c. From the Conquest, Anno 1066, to the Year 1677
Francis Sandford
Saint Christopher walking with the infant Christ on his right shoulder
Guido Reni
Epileptics Walking to the Left from Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to the Church at Molenbeeck
Hendrick Hondius I
The Adoration of the Christ Child
Jacob Cornelisz. van OostsanenWorkshop of Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen
Still Life with Ostrich Egg Cup and the Whitfield Heirlooms
Pieter Gerritsz. van Roestraeten
Why power & politics dominated Renaissance and Baroque art
The theme of power & politics returns again and again across two centuries of European painting. Renaissance and Baroque artists were working inside a culture where this subject carried specific weight: religious, civic, moral, erotic, political. The paintings collected here are not a random group — they are a record of how that subject was handled, contested, and reinvented by the painters who shaped Western art.
Each painting page on Paintale opens with the story of the work, then drills into the symbols a contemporary viewer would have read, the techniques the painter used to make those symbols feel inevitable, and the provenance trail that brought the painting from its first patron to its current museum wall.