Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travels on Paper, 1450–1700

last updated 8 January 2015

Art is a perfect vehicle for the armchair traveler who 'œgets pleasure from the voyages of others,' said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. 'œFabulous Journeys and Faraway Places,' a small show drawn from the National Gallery's deep collection of old master prints and drawings, presents maps and images from Renaissance Europe. 'œBefore the age of jet travel, many Europeans toured the world through the kinds of pictures in this show.' Not that they gleaned a particularly accurate impression of it. The images here include 'œeverything from Renaissance views of the Holy Land and Turkish Empire to fantastical images of Eden and the Fountain of Youth,' along with accurate studies of the indigenous peoples and creatures Europeans discovered in the New World.

The exhibition takes us across centuries as well as around the world, said Joanna Shaw-Eagle in The Washington Times. The preoccupations of artists changed greatly over these 250 years. The earliest works present wholly imaginary scenes, such as Martin Schongauer's The Flight Into Egypt (c. 1470'“75), 'œin which an angel tenderly shakes dates down from a tree to feed the Holy Family.' Images created less than a century later, however, include 'œrealistic scenes of dangerous journeys over land and sea.' Hieronymus Cock's The Baths of Diocletian (1550) captures the Roman ruin in remarkable detail, while Pieter Coecke van Aelst's The Ways and Fashions of the Turks presents a 16-foot-long panorama filled with authentic tapestries, costumes, and activities. This is 'œthe exhibit's high point,' reflecting the artist's observations during his own journey to Constantinople. But such accuracy was in short supply: One Spanish map from 1562 exaggerates the Empire's equatorial colonies, 'œwith North America squeezed into a much smaller top section.'