By Coral Gables Gazette staff
The Lowe Art Museum will invite visitors to step inside the imagined worlds of Renaissance and Baroque painters on Saturday, Jan. 31, with a special expert-led tour examining how landscape transformed Western art.
Volunteer docent Carol Millas will guide guests through a one-hour in-depth exploration of masterworks in the museum’s Kress Galleries alongside highlights from the current special exhibition, Imagined Worlds: Landscape and Narrative in the Lowe Art Museum’s Old Masters Collection. The tour begins at 11 a.m. and is designed to illuminate how artists from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries used perspective, scenery, and spatial illusion to shape storytelling in painting.
From flat backdrops to imagined worlds
The exhibition traces a pivotal shift in art history — when painters moved beyond flat symbolic backgrounds and began constructing richly detailed environments that gave viewers the sense of looking through a window into another reality.
That transformation can be traced to early Renaissance innovators such as architect Filippo Brunelleschi and theorist Leon Battista Alberti, who popularized linear perspective, a technique that allowed artists to render depth and distance with unprecedented realism. Their ideas reshaped visual culture, enabling painters to situate figures within convincing landscapes that conveyed emotion, narrative, and social meaning.
When landscape becomes the story
In some of the works featured at the Lowe, the landscape itself becomes the central subject. Rolling hills, turbulent seas, towering cliffs, and dramatic skies dominate the canvas, while tiny human figures appear almost as afterthoughts — emphasizing the power of nature and the artist’s technical mastery.
In others, scenery plays a more subtle role, grounding religious stories and portraits in recognizable or symbolic settings. A winding road, distant city, or carefully placed tree might reveal clues about a sitter’s identity, status, or spiritual journey.
Still other paintings use architectural elements such as stone walls, window frames, or drawn-back curtains to draw viewers deeper into the scene, blurring the line between the real world and the artist’s imagined one.
An expert-led look at artistic innovation
Millas’ guided tour will unpack these visual strategies, helping participants understand how Old Masters used landscape not simply as decoration, but as an essential storytelling tool.
The exhibition itself, organized by the Lowe Art Museum, showcases works drawn from the museum’s renowned Old Masters collection, offering rare opportunities to view pieces that are not always on public display.
Together, the Kress Galleries and the special exhibition form a sweeping survey of how European painters across generations experimented with space, light, and scenery to reshape visual perception.
A cultural anchor in Coral Gables
The tour also places these artistic developments in broader cultural context, touching on how Renaissance humanism, scientific inquiry, and shifting views of the natural world influenced painters’ approach to realism and narrative.
The event offers both an educational experience and a chance to engage closely with works that span centuries of artistic innovation.
The Lowe Art Museum, located on the University of Miami campus, has long been a cultural anchor in South Florida, housing collections that range from Greco-Roman antiquities to contemporary art. Its Old Masters holdings, supported in part by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, are among its most celebrated assets.
Exhibition continues through February
Imagined Worlds: Landscape and Narrative in the Lowe Art Museum’s Old Masters Collection runs through Feb. 14, allowing visitors additional opportunities to explore the exhibition beyond the Jan. 31 tour.
The exhibition has been made possible through the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, the City of Coral Gables, Beaux Arts Miami, the Lowe Advisory Council, and museum members. Additional sponsorship comes from the State of Florida Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Museum officials say the expert tour format is designed to foster deeper engagement with the art, offering insights that casual viewing may overlook.
For those interested in art history, Renaissance innovation, or experiencing masterworks through a guided lens, the Saturday morning program provides an accessible entry point into centuries of visual storytelling.
The one-hour tour is included with museum admission and is open to the public.
