Culture

The Renaissance gets ‘weird’ at Minneapolis Institute of Art

Curator Tom Rassieur injects fun and surrealism into the era’s classic form.

By Alicia Eler

The Minnesota Star Tribune

September 5, 2025 at 6:59PM

Enea Vico's 1548 engraving of a rhinoceros catapults viewers into the Renaissance's weird side. The original of the print was by Albrecht Dürer. (Mia Visual Resources staff)

A 16th-century engraving of a rhinoceros with scaly skin emerges as part-lizard, part-beast. A witchy woman and a suspicious horse peer at a man, mysteriously lying dead on the ground. Tree trunks transformed partially into human figures are having sex and running wild.

These aren’t memes being passed around on social media. They are bizarre scenes from Renaissance-era engravings, etchings and woodcuts.

Known for realism, accurate depictions of human anatomy and developments in linear perspective, the Renaissance is the epitome of not-weird.

But there’s a twist to that concept at a Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibition.

“The Weirdening of the Renaissance,” a tight-knit, single-room exhibition, explores prints from the era that verge into the surreal and straight-up bizarre. Organized by prints and drawings curator Tom Rassieur, the show promises to change people’s minds about the Renaissance.

Hans Baldung's 1544 woodcut "Bewitched Groom" portrays a sort of modern-day whodunit scene. (Mia Visual Resources staff)

The “weirdening,” Rassieur said started in 1506, when a Roman farmer discovered “Laocoön and His Sons,” a marble sculpture from the Hellenistic era from the second century B.C., depicting sea serpents attacking a Trojan priest and his sons.

“Suddenly these artists had this major, big sculpture that came from Antiquity but was full of energy. It wasn’t symmetrical and it was this wild story,” Rassieur said. “That triggers this feeling of artistic license.”

After dominant High Renaissance artist Raphael died in 1520, the artists who worked for him left. When Holy Roman Emperor Charles V attacked Rome in 1527, the system of commissioning art broke down, too. Artists went to northern Italy or to France, decorating the palace of Francis I.

“These ideas of the Renaissance go with them, but the framework is all gone, so they start twisting the ideas,” Rassieur said. Artists started manipulating perspective, and realism gave way to imagination.

Curator Frederick Ilchman, chair of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and scholar of later Renaissance art, noted the curiosity of Rassieur’s show.

“People talk about exceptions all the time, like one oddity that doesn’t really fit into the schema,” Ilchman said. “But Tom is saying: wait, time out ― it’s a larger trend. It may even represent a shift.”

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The show at times pairs a classic Renaissance print with a “weird one,” or just lets the weirdness shine on its own.

In the 16th century "Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus" by Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael, many classic Renaissance elements are at play. (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

A classic Renaissance scene plays out in Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael’s collaborative 16th-century engraving “Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus.” In the engraving, muses surround Apollo as he plays a lyre, and poets of different eras, including Greek Homer, Roman Virgil and Tuscan Dante, gather together.

But then 30 years later, an engraving shows up, and it’s unclear who made it. However, the structure looks similar to the previous work, especially the trees and size.

It’s part of a group of prints known with the monogram “HFE.”

Master HFE's engraving "Parnassus Profaned" portrays people, animals and even trees having sex. (Ana Taylor)

“Instead of being a high-minded print asset, it’s all about sex,” Rassieur said. “The people are having sex. The animals are having sex and the trees are having sex.”

Inside the low-lit second-floor gallery, oddities from the Renaissance emerge at every turn.

Master printmaker Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I,” 1514, reads like a puzzle. There’s even a grid with numbers in it that always add up to 34, with 34 possible combinations.

“It’s an intellectual feat that is another unprecedented aspect of this image,” Rassieur said.

Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melencolia I," 1514, is a curious departure from traditional Renaissance era ideas. (Dan Dennehy)

A bizarre etching attributed to Juste de Juste, circa 1540-45, shows a pyramid of five men, wobbling in a strange balance. The etching was never meant to be shared beyond a small circle of artists, and it was probably just for fun.

In Juste de Juste's etching "Pyramid of Five Men," human anatomy is twisted and distorted. (Charles Walbridge)

The distorted figures pile on top of one another, their toes reaching one another in very intimate ways.

The works at the Mia show — which runs through Nov. 30 — are all multiples, not one-off paintings or sculptures. Each highly detailed print had to be created in reverse.

“One can make the case that great art can be a multiple,” Ilchman said. “This is real art, these were painstakingly made.