New Rijksmuseum exhibition showcases Renaissance portraits

AMSTERDAM (AP) — As COVID-19 lockdowns ease and borders reopen, there is a gathering at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum of people from around Europe, depicted in more than 100 Renaissance portraits.

The Dutch national museum's new exhibition “Remember Me,” covers the century 1470-1570 and features portraits from across the continent by masters including Albrecht Duerer, Hans Holbein and Titian that underscore humanity's enduring desire to be remembered.

It also shows the lengths artists went to to portray people, their wealth, jobs, power and love for one another.

While the exhibition has been in the works since before the global pandemic swept the world last year, the wish to be remembered is something that felt more pressing than ever amid lockdowns, said the museum's general director Taco Dibbits.

“We now felt with the corona crisis that people were so far away they couldn’t come to you. You couldn’t travel,” Dibbits said Tuesday. ”That was always the case in the Renaissance, when it was far harder to travel and ... there was this great longing to have the person with you. I think something that we felt over the last one-and-a-half years.”

The show offers a snapshot of European society in the Renaissance period and includes for the first time in a single exhibition the two earliest individual portraits of Black men known in Europe — a painting by Jan Jansz Mostaert of a man in military attire who was possibly Christophle le More, a personal bodyguard to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and a 1508 drawing, "Portrait of an African Man," in black chalk by Albrecht Duerer that is on loan from Vienna's Albertina Collection.

For Dibbits, whose museum has just wrapped up a groundbreaking exhibition bringing the history of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies into...