A lavish past
As of March 2022, the Museum Hof van Busleyden will be undergoing restoration. The permanent exhibition will therefore not be accessible for some time. More information .
Museum Hof van Busleyden - 27.11.2021 – 27.02.2022
People have always looked back at the past with great interest. History was popular in the nineteenth century, much as it is today. It was the century when new nations were born and others took a more prominent role on the international stage. The Romantic Era saw a renewed interest in the Dukes of Burgundy, from Philip the Bold to the glorious Emperor Charles V.
And so the fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Burgundian rulers returned to the foreground in a number of European countries. 'In Belgium they were depicted in paintings, literature and sculpture as patriarchs of the new Belgian state. However, their image varied greatly from country to country. What can it tell us about the nineteenth-century view of the past? Or about the ways we look at our history today?
In A Lavish Past. The Burgundians Through the Eyes of the Romantics you look from the modern context, with a critical eye and a changing perspective, to the past. The underground exhibition space in Museum Hof van Busleyden looks and feels like a nineteenth- century monumental museum and, through seventy works, reveals the longing for grandeur in years gone by.
A Lavish Past is a collaboration between Museum Hof van Busleyden and the Monastère royal de Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse (France). The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published in Dutch and French editions by Uitgeverij Snoeck.
