Painting’s Dreams at the End of the World

Art, the artist, and the imagination attained unprecedented significance around 1500 in a Europe upended by cultural transformation, religious reform, and millenarian expectations. These years also witnessed Europe's decisive encounter with the Americas. Art history has perceived little overlap between this epochal event and the fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity that drove much period artistic experimentation. Yet in imaginative sketches by Albrecht Dürer, revolutionary religious frescoes by Luca Signorelli, and a flight of butterflies from a singular mythological painting, we can recover a lost history in which antiquity and the “new world" intertwined to inspire a culture in search of self-renewal.