The Städel Museum's collection of Old Masters can look back at a more than two-hundred-year history. It began in 1817, when the deceased Frankfurt banker and art collector Johan Friedrich Städel left a bequest to the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. Since then, the Frankfurt museum has presented works from the most prominent schools of European painting, dating from the late thirteenth century to the eighteenth. With paintings such as Bronzino's Portrait of a Lady in Red, Jan van Eyck's Lucca Madonna, Sandro Botticelli's Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, Albrecht Dürer's Job and His Wife, Rembrandt's The Blinding of Samson, Johannes Vermeer's The Geographer, and Pompeo Girolamo Batoni's Allegory of the Arts, the museum owns many key works of art from five centuries of European painting. In thirteen chapters, this updated, new edition of the opulent catalog presents around two hundred outstanding pieces from the Städel's collection of Old Masters.
