Royal Museums Greenwich, London
Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I
Royal Museums Greenwich has raised the £10.3m needed to secure the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I (around 1590). Painted by an unknown artist to mark England’s victory over the Spanish Armada, the portrait is considered a masterpiece of the English Renaissance. The campaign to buy the work from the descendants of Sir Francis Drake received £7.4m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, £1m from the Art Fund and £1.5m in public donations. The portrait will go on display in the Queen’s House, on the site of the birthplace of Elizabeth I, when it reopens in October after renovations. “With 2016 being the 90th birthday year of our present Queen, there could not be a more appropriate way to celebrate the second great Elizabethan era,” says Kevin Fewster, the director of Royal Museums Greenwich.
Art Institute of Chicago
Painting by Sebastiano del Piombo
The Art Institute of Chicago is expanding its collection of Italian High Renaissance painting with a newly discovered work by Sebastiano del Piombo, one of the most celebrated painters of 16th-century Rome. Christ Carrying the Cross (1515/17), acquired through the London-based art gallery Colnaghi, is the first major work by the artist to surface on the market in recent years. It is now on view in the museum’s European painting and sculpture galleries.
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Egidio Marzona archive
The German-Italian collector Egidio Marzona has donated his vast archive of avant-garde art to Dresden’s State Art Collections. With 1.5 million items acquired since the end of the 1960s, the collection includes correspondence, sketches, artists’ books, photographs and films documenting the major 20th-century art movements. The institution will develop joint research projects on the archive with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation at Berlin’s State Museums, which received major gifts from Marzona’s collection in 2002 and 2014.