Arts Daily / Charleston Collects: Devotion and Fantasy, Witchcraft and the World’s End

Charleston Collects: Devotion and Fantasy, Witchcraft and the World’s End

This selection of Northern Renaissance paintings and prints, sourced from a major private Charleston collection, introduces a world of intensely, and sometimes disturbingly, vivid imagery. Created in the Netherlands and Germany between 1440 and 1590, this is a world of contradictions and unease—whether the subject is a troubled Virgin Mary contemplating her young son, or a menacing group of malevolent figures inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, or Albrecht Dürer’s famous scenes from Revelations. In the turbulent era of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Reformation in Northern Europe, viewers found their hopes, desires and anxieties mirrored in images like these inspiring pious beliefs or depicting fantastic visions of good and evil.