Lucas van Leyden (1489/1494-1533), Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Love, 1519, Engraving, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

Sebald Beham (1500-1550), The Fountain of Youth, Woodcut, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617), Tantalus, Engraving, Ruth and Jacob Kainen.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, Engraving, sheet, trimmed to plate mark: 24.8 x 10.1 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection, 1943.3.3519.

National Gallery
4th and
Constitution Avenue NW
202-737-4215
Washington
West Building,
Ground Floor,
West Outer Tier
Fabulous Journeys
and Faraway Places:
Travels on Paper, 1450-1700
May 6-September 16, 2007

Today's travelers capture their memories with digital cameras, sharing them with friends near and far on the Internet. A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travels on Paper, 1450-1700, takes us back to a time when European artists depicted real and imagined places and distributed their marvelous images to an intensely curious audience in the only way possible — through prints on paper.

The exhibition presents more than 60 printed works documenting mythological and fanciful travel, pilgrimages to holy sites, and voyages of discovery to real, faraway places. A highlight is The Ways and Fashions of the Turks (1553), by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a 16-foot-long panorama of a trip to Constantinople. Another is the Gutiérrez Map (1562), a rare early plan of the new world by Hieronymus Cock, embellished with sea monsters, cannibals, and fearsome beasts.

"It’s difficult today to imagine a time when so few people ventured far from where they were born and when prints on paper were the only source of information about remote lands," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "This exhibition provides a glimpse at exquisitely rendered, early travel images which had a tremendous impact on Europeans and the future of exploration."

Nearly all the works are part of the National Gallery’s collection.

The Exhibition
The first room of the exhibition is devoted to early fantasy and allegorical travel. It presents allegories of life and death as a journey, a medieval map of the world with bizarre creatures inhabiting its fringes, and happy travelers who have discovered such worldly paradises as the Fountain of Youth and the Garden of Love. Images of real, earthly travel dominate the second room, with prints of pilgrims on their sacred journeys and maps showing their travel routes. There are views of sacred sites in Rome and the ruins of classical antiquity, along with printed illustrations made by travelers to Constantinople and the Holy Land. Europeans were fascinated with Islamic customs and costumes, cities, people, and rulers, and magnificent prints of these subjects appear in this part of the exhibition.

On view in the last room is a series of prints and drawings related to 16th- and 17th-century European excursions around the edges of Africa and into the Americas. Large-scale, beautifully decorated maps are the focal points of this room. With them appear prints of exotic animals, the human or semi-human beings believed to occupy these newly-discovered habitats, and the unexploited commercial marvels of North and South America that beckoned Europeans to these countries.

Theodor Galle after Jan van der Straet (c. 1571-1633), The Discovery of America, from New Discoveries, detail, c. 1580 / 1590, Engraving, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.