Museum Acquisitions Span Renaissance Rediscovery, Goldsmithing, and Salman Toor
Three museums have added works that reach across five centuries of art history, from a rediscovered Florentine painting to a 16th-century silver gilt goblet and a contemporary canvas by Salman Toor. The acquisitions, announced together, show how institutions continue to build collections through a mix of scholarship, provenance, and donor support.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist (1512/13) by Rosso Fiorentino has entered the collection. The oil on canvas was long believed lost, but recent cleaning exposed Saint John the Evangelist beneath later overpaint and confirmed the painting as the one described by Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Artists. Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540) painted the work as a teenager, and the survival is especially notable because only about two dozen paintings by the Florentine Renaissance artist are known.
The Met’s director and chief executive officer, Max Hollein, said the work’s “unusual placement of figures and daring postures” turn a familiar devotional subject into “a charged encounter” that draws viewers into “a complex interplay of seeing, feeling and believing.” The painting’s rediscovery gives the museum a rare example of Mannerism at an early, unusually vivid stage.
In Siegen, Germany, the Siegerland Museum acquired Goblet (around 1581) by Hans Rappolt I. The 48cm silver gilt vessel reflects Nuremberg’s prominence in 16th-century goldsmithing and is decorated with fruit, grotesque masks, and birds of paradise. The inside of the lid bears the arms of Valentin von und zu der Hees the Younger, and the object later entered the Rothschild banking family’s collection before its sale in 2019. Christine Regus, secretary general of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, said the acquisition is significant because it is the only work by Rappolt I accessible to the public in Germany outside Dresden. The foundation supported the purchase with a €75,000 donation.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has also added Wandering Beggars (2022) by Salman Toor, donated by the Bronzini-Vender family. It is the first work by the New York-based, Pakistan-born artist to enter the museum’s collection. The circular oil painting draws on two early 20th-century works centered on solitary figures and people at the margins: Van Gogh’s The Sower (1888), in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, and Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which is also in the NGA’s collection.
Toor’s museum profile has risen steadily since his first major solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2020-21. His first European solo exhibition is scheduled to open at the Courtauld in London in October, extending the institutional momentum now surrounding his work.
