Northern Lights: Masterpieces of Flemish Caravaggism celebrates Colnaghi's first year in its new Brussels premices with a museum-quality exhibition dedicated to one of the most compelling yet often neglected chapters in European art history, the encounter between Flemish painting and Caravaggio’s radical naturalism.

 

The exhibition explores how a generation of Flemish artists drawn to Italy by the light and psychological intensity of Caravaggio reinterpreted his vision through their own northern sensibility and the enduring influence of Peter Paul Rubens.

 

While some painters, such as Hendrick De Somer and Matthias Stom, chose to remain in Italy, others returned to Flanders to develop a distinctly local version of Caravaggism, among them Abraham Janssens, and Jan van Dalem. Their works, included in the exhibition, reflect a dynamic exchange between Rome, Naples, and Antwerp, an artistic dialogue which defined European painting in the early seventeenth century.

 
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