From the museum website
Over the years the Georgia Museum of Art has amassed an impressive collection of European works on paper, one of the most important in the South. Among those works is a choice selection of German and Netherlandish prints featuring religious, and specifically Christian, subject matter. This exhibition assembles for the first time selected highlights from this group of prints, ranging in date from the 15th to the 20th centuries, by such artists as Max Beckman, Pieter Bruegel, Otto Dix, Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt van Rijn and Martin Schongauer. While a number of artists featured in this exhibition are revered as painters, the appreciation of their combined talents as printmakers is equally commendable.
Devotional prints were not merely substitutes for the written word, images for the illiterate, but were more readily visual commentaries that amplified and made more accessible the mysteries, personalities and remote stories from religious texts. Widely circulated and relatively inexpensive, prints could elicit reflection, meditation and discussion on various sacred topics. Some prints combine image and text to enrich the viewing experience, while others record larger or popular works of art. In certain cases, religious subjects serve as convenient pretexts for the portrayal of other motifs, including detailed landscapes, a genre that rose in popularity among European connoisseurs beginning in the 16th century.
Visitors can admire the technical achievements of these engravings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs: from the precision of line to the refinement of modeling with light and shadow that simulates pictorial qualities.
Supporters
The W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation
Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art