Love, death, marriage and power haunt the single, darkened room where this exhibition invites you to contemplate people who lived half a thousand years ago. How much can you read in their faces, their touching hands? In Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s Marriage Portrait of Jakob Fugger and Sybilla Arzt, painted in 1498, this Augsburg banker and his wife stand with pinched formality, but he puts a hand round her arm. A possessive gesture or a tender one? Burgkmair leaves us to guess.
Jacob was a rich Fugger, the head of Germany’s leading commercial family. He and Sybilla could afford to join the European elite captured in this show, which spans the rulers and super-rich of a continent and follows their marital intrigues. The higher up you went in the sociopolitical stratosphere, the more hung on who you got hitched to. A tiny painting by Corneille de Lyon depicts Madeleine, fifth child of Francis I of France: such paintings of young women were adverts to attract princely husbands, but the artist is honest enough to show Madeleine as frail and unhealthy. In spite of that, and against the rules of arranged marriage, James V of Scotland seems to have fallen for her sincerely, severing his previous engagement and getting wed in Notre-Dame. She died just a couple of months after he got her home to Edinburgh.
