Credo

With its second special exhibition, the Draiflessen Collection presented prayers – the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the Hail Mary – expressed in images, based on exhibits from the fourteenth to eighteenth century, all on loan from international museums and collections. The focus was Peter Paul Rubens and his studio’s Apostle series, images characterized by sharp physiognomy and heroic depiction, and in which each apostle allegorizes a verse of the profession of faith. Collected around these works were more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, graphic works, drawings and decorative art objects by European masters, including works by El Greco, Antoon van Dyck, and Jan Brueghel the Elder. The exhibition pursued the goal of opening up a perspective that facilitates an understanding of the works beyond the intense imagery, which continues to be breathtaking to this very day. It thus directed the gaze to the religious value of the works for the people of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, a value that viewers today are often no longer able to comprehend. For this reason, the exhibition showed the works the twofold appreciation with which they have met since the time they were created: on the one hand as products of religious art and on the other as artworks with their own individual aesthetic assets.