Includes largest surviving cartoon by Guido Reni, a rare pier table by Piranesi, and a Flemish altarpiece unseen for more than 50 years
Minneapolis—The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) has recently completed conservation treatments on three major works of European art, now newly installed and on view. A mix of recent acquisitions and long-standing collection objects, each project addressed structural and aesthetic problems that had limited how—or even whether—the works could be shown. One work is a monumental fresco cartoon by Guido Reni, the largest known to survive by the artist and one of only two major Renaissance or Baroque cartoons in an American collection, which was acquired by Mia in 2024. Another, the Rezzonico Pier Table, is one of only two surviving pieces of furniture attributed to Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The third work, Jan Cossiers’s Adoration of the Shepherds, is a baroque altarpiece originally made for a clandestine Catholic church in Amsterdam. Acquired by Mia in 1971, the work was on public view for only a few weeks and has been in storage ever since. Treatments for all three works were carried out at the Midwest Art Conservation Center (MACC), the independent conservation center housed on Mia’s campus.
“Conservation is one of the least visible parts of a museum’s work and yet one of the most consequential,” said Katie Luber, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “These three projects each answer a different problem—a fragile work on paper that could not be shown, a masterwork of design obscured by centuries of grime, and an altarpiece that spent five decades in storage because of its fragile state. Now what they share is the remarkable outcome from treatment as works that our visitors can actually see and enjoy.”
“As a curator, one of the most gratifying elements of my job is seeing an object that we knew was beautiful transformed into that thing of beauty through effective conservation,” said Rachel McGarry, Mia’s Elizabeth MacMillan Chair and Curator of European Art. “The Piranesi table was so drab that visitors would rightly walk past it in the gallery. The Reni cartoon and Cossiers painting were too delicate even to share with visitors in the first place. Now, these are works they cannot miss, drawing the eye and holding your attention.”
Two Female Allegories Representing Fire and Air (cartoon for a fresco, c. 1614), Guido Reni, Italian (Bologna), 1575–1642
Guido Reni was one of the most celebrated painters in Italy at his death in 1642, and his cartoons—full-scale preparatory drawings used to transfer a design to a wall or panel—were among the works collectors prized most. However, cartoons were often destroyed in the transfer process, and those that survived, often built up from many sheets of paper glued together, were vulnerable to damage and fading over the centuries, making them exceptionally rare. Reni made this one for a frescoed chimneypiece in the Palazzo dell’Armi Marescalchi in Bologna. Although the palace was damaged during World War II, the fresco survives in the building.
Acquired by Mia in 2024, the work is the first Italian cartoon to enter Mia’s collection and makes Mia only the second U.S. museum to hold a major Renaissance or Baroque cartoon, joining the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cartoon was drawn in black chalk on 15 joined sheets laid down on canvas. Measuring roughly six feet square, it’s the largest surviving cartoon by Reni and one of only a handful by the artist’s hand to survive.
The condition problems that had kept the work off view were addressed in a six-month treatment process. The surface was cleaned, and extensive areas of lifting paper were stabilized and consolidated. The tacking margins were extended with strips of fine linen, and the work was attached to a new stretcher, giving the large canvas proper tension. Glazed in UV-filtering acrylic, the cartoon can now be shown for extended periods, and will rotate between Mia’s Italian painting galleries and its works-on-paper galleries.
The Rezzonico Pier Table (c. 1768), Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–1778
While Piranesi is mostly recognized for his etchings of ancient ruins and imaginary prisons, he also designed interiors and furnishings that realized his vision of an eclectic modern classicism. This pier table is one of only two surviving pieces of furniture that can be securely attributed to him. It was completed around 1768 for the apartments of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Rezzonico (1740–1783) in the Quirinal Palace, then the summer residence of the popes. Rezzonico, a nephew of Pope Clement XIII, had been elevated to the cardinalate at 26 and served as the pope’s majordomo. As it happens, Rezzonico is also buried in a church Piranesi built for him: Santa Maria del Priorato, on the Aventine Hill.
The table’s five legs take the form of chimeras—combining the heads of lions, the wings of birds, and the cloven feet of goats—and support an exuberantly carved apron of ox skulls, urns, scrolling acanthus, floral garlands, and classical moldings, executed in finely carved limewood and gilded over an oak framework by an anonymous craftsman of exceptional skill. Prior to its recent conservation, the table’s gilded surfaces were obscured by accumulated grime, along with insect damage, discolored repairs, and structural weaknesses that threatened its stability. Conservation at MACC stabilized the fragile carving, consolidated the original gilding, repaired structural joins, reduced disfiguring surface deposits, and cleaned the decorative surfaces. All of this restored the brilliance and legibility of Piranesi’s design while preserving the object’s historic elements. Mia has long held one of the finest collections of 18th-century Roman art in the United States—and this newly restored table stands as one of that period’s greatest examples.
Adoration of the Shepherds (1657), Jan Cossiers, Flemish, 1600–1671
This altarpiece was painted for the Krijtberg, a clandestine Catholic church in Amsterdam dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier. The Jesuits founded the Krijtberg in 1654 and hired artists from the Catholic southern Netherlands—Cossiers among them—who were experts in the dramatic baroque idiom developed to promote the Catholic faith during the Counter-Reformation. Mia acquired the painting in 1971 and showed it for only a few weeks, over that year’s Christmas holiday. During construction of the museum’s Tange expansion in 1972–74, it was moved to storage, but its fragile condition meant it never returned to public view.
In 2024, Mia launched a conservation project for the painting to address both structural and aesthetic problems. As with the Reni cartoon above, a failing secondary lining was removed, markedly reducing deformations in the canvas; the tacking margins were extended with fine linen and the painting was attached to a new stretcher. Cleaning removed centuries of surface dirt and grime and reduced discolored varnish layers, and thickly applied overpaint was removed, revealing large areas of the original composition. The warm light illuminating the heavenly sphere in the upper canvas is visible again, along with the free brushwork that makes Cossiers’s angels appear weightless. This was a deliberate contrast with the exacting detail of the artist’s rustic stable below: the shepherds’ expressive hands and faces, their gifts of chickens and a bound lamb, the coarse straw of the manger, and the ox and donkey crowding around the Christ Child. The museum also commissioned a new frame for the painting by Peter Schade, London, reproducing an appropriate period design.
For more information on Mia’s conservation program, visit artsmia.org.
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