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From the contemplative silence of medieval devotional panels to the sumptuous surface pleasure of Baroque portraiture and still life, the exhibition, LIFE IN FULL, OLD MASTERS FROM DUCCIO TO LIOTARD offers a rare and generous survey of six centuries of European painting drawn from the Kunstmuseum Bern’s rich holdings. Curated by Anne-Christine Strobel, with assistant curator Michelle Fritschi, the exhibition places particular emphasis on the Bernese Renaissance alongside the early Florentine and Sienese traditions of the Trecento and Quattrocento, giving works by Duccio di Buoninsega, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and the Berner Nelkenmeister pride of place.Â
The exhibition feels less like a lesson in art history and more like a slow walk-through time, guided by paintings that still know how to speak. At the Kunstmuseum Bern, works spanning from the 13th to 18th century are brought together not to impress with their rarity, but to remind us how closely art has always been tied to everyday life, belief, power, and pleasure.
From the quite intensity of Duccio’s devotional painting to the refined elegance of Lioatard’s portraits, the exhibition unfolds as a continuous narrative in which the sacred gradually makes room for the human, the intimate, and the worldly.
What strikes most is not the distance of centuries, but the familiarity of gestures, faces, and emotions that still feel surprisingly close.
Showing together, these paintings reveal the strength of the Kunstmuseum Bern’s Old Master’s collection and the museum’s confidence in its own history. Rather than isolating masterpieces, Life in Full allows them to converse across time, showing how painting evolved alongside society itself.
The exhibition invites viewers to linger, to look again , and to rediscover how painting once served as a way of understanding the world in its entirety – faith and doubt, power and fragility ,joy and loss.
In doing so, it quietly affirms that these old works are not relics of the past, but living images, still capable of shaping how we see life today.
The Exhibition LIFE IN FULL,OLD MASTERS FROM DUCCIO TO LIOTARD,is on view at the Kunstmuseum Bern Switzerland between the dates, 13 February and 27 September 2026.
