The Phoenix Art Museum is currently showcasing one of the most significant private collections of Florentine Baroque art outside of Italy, featuring more than 30 exceptional works from the renowned Haukohl Collection. The exhibition, which opened in late August and runs through July 26, represents six generations of passionate art collecting by the Haukohl family, dating back to 1836.
Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl's journey into art collecting began in childhood when his parents regularly took him and his brothers to galleries and museums as part of their education. During one memorable visit when the boys were between 10 and 12 years old, their parents allowed each child to select artwork for their bedrooms. "So my older brother picked a great watercolor from Audubon," Haukohl recalls. "I picked three heads by Otto Dix and my little brother picked an Old Master painting." This early exposure established a family tradition that began with Haukohl's great-grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1836.
Over the past four decades, Haukohl has developed his focus specifically on Old Masters—the great European painters from the Renaissance period of the 15th century through the beginning of the Romantic period in the late 18th century. His particular expertise lies in collecting works from the Baroque period in Florence, spanning the 17th and early 18th centuries. Through meticulous acquisition and scholarship, Haukohl has assembled what is now recognized as the largest and most important private collection of Florentine Baroque art outside Italy.
The current exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum represents part of an extensive educational tour that has visited 15 different university art museums before arriving in Phoenix. According to Rachel Sadvary Zebro, Phoenix Art Museum associate curator of collections, the show has traveled to prestigious institutions including Ball State University in Indiana, Rollins College in Orlando, and the University of Georgia over the past two years. "Education is important for us, and it's the key thing of the Haukohl Philanthropies," Haukohl explains. "We try to identify underserved communities, communities where we can interface with a lot of students and also museums that do not have a large Italian Old Master painting collection."
The exhibition's educational mission will be highlighted on January 28, when Dr. Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, will present a special lecture on the frames of Florence's Baroque period. This focus on frames reflects Haukohl's meticulous attention to historical authenticity, as he has spent years locating original 17th-century Florentine frames to properly display each work. "It has been a very deliberate project to find frames from the Florentine Baroque that best suit the paintings in the collection," Haukohl notes. "The goal is to find an original 17th-century Florentine frame, which is doable, but it takes years. A frame could come from Paris or London or New York or an antique shop. You just don't know where you're going to find something like that."
The Phoenix exhibition organizes most works thematically into three distinct sections: "Faith, Strength, and Courage," "Sacred Beauty, Fierce Devotion," and "Allegories, Gods, and Heroes." Additionally, the show features several works that fall outside these categories, including a mural depicting the Bargello Palazzo based on a 19th-century drawing, stucco reliefs of prominent Florentines such as Machiavelli, Galileo, and Michelangelo, and an oil-on-canvas portrait of a member of the powerful Medici family.
The "Faith, Strength, and Courage" section presents compelling biblical narratives through masterful paintings, including depictions of Judith beheading Holofernes from the apocryphal Book of Judith, God rebuking Cain for murdering his brother, Salome with the head of John the Baptist, and multiple renderings of Mary with the infant Jesus. Alessandro Gherardini's painting of the Annunciation, showing the angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary about Jesus's birth, exemplifies the dense symbolic imagery characteristic of this period, with helpful gallery placards providing viewers essential context for interpretation.
The "Sacred Beauty, Fierce Devotion" grouping showcases paintings of Roman Catholic saints that continue centuries-old European artistic traditions while evolving to emphasize the saints' humanity alongside their divinity. Notable works include Giovanni Battista Vanni's "Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness," depicted with a lamb and palm-bearing cherub, and Jacopo Giorgi's "Penitent Magdalene," showing Mary Magdalene with symbolic motifs representing her presence at Christ's Crucifixion and her repentance. The section also features two distinct paintings of Saint Sebastian, both incorporating arrows to symbolize his martyrdom.
The third thematic section, "Allegories, Gods, and Heroes," encompasses both sculpture and painting depicting figures from Greco-Roman mythology as well as stock characters from commedia dell'arte, a form of comic theater. Paintings by distinguished artists Ottavio Vannini, Felice Ficherelli, and Cesare Dandini present personifications of meditation, poetry, and music respectively. The theatrical tradition appears in works featuring Harlequin and Pierrot, clown-like commedia dell'arte characters, painted by Giovanni Domenico Ferretti and Narcisse Virgile Díaz de la Peña. One of the exhibition's two statues portrays the wing-footed Mercury holding his caduceus, demonstrating the period's fascination with classical mythology.
A compelling fourth theme emerges throughout the three designated groupings: the empowerment of women. This appears prominently in Onorio Marinari's painting of the biblical Judith, whom Sadvary Zebro describes as "a strong figural composition portraying a woman who is the heroine of her city" after she beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes to save the Israelites. The theme continues through humanistic renderings of the Madonna and other female saints, presented as lifelike human figures rather than distant divine beings, and culminates in Vincenzo Dandini's painting of Juno, wife of Jupiter and queen of the gods in Roman mythology, portrayed not as an ancient divine being but as a powerful noble woman of the Baroque period.
When original period frames proved elusive, Haukohl commissioned new ones to maintain historical authenticity. One such commissioned frame now adorns Giovanni Domenico Ferretti's "Harlequin and His Lady," featuring ornate gold texturing with detailed cherubic figures in various postures, demonstrating the collector's commitment to presenting each work in its proper historical context.
The exhibition, included with regular museum admission and running through July 26, offers visitors an extraordinary opportunity to experience these rarely seen masterpieces. As Sadvary Zebro emphasizes, "the show truly is a window into what life would be like in Florence in the seventeenth century at the Medici court." The Phoenix Art Museum is located at 1625 N. Central Ave, with tickets and information available through the museum's website.
