The Salzburg Museum presents an exquisite exhibition on the art of Salzburg and its surrounding region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the newly redesigned Mollien Rooms of the Denon Wing at the Louvre. Around one hundred works of art—including drawings, oil sketches, sculptures, and outstanding examples of decorative arts—convey the creativity, dynamism, and spirit of Baroque artistic production and representation. The rapidly executed sketches, in particular, capture the energy and expressive gestures characteristic of the Baroque era. City views document the urban transformations that took place under the direction of Austria’s most renowned Baroque architects, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Lucas von Hildebrandt.

Although artists such as Johann Michael Rottmayr, Paul Troger, Kremser Schmidt, Meinrad Guggenbichler, Martin Zürn the Younger, and Joseph Anton Pfaffinger were highly esteemed by their contemporaries, their reputations did not extend as far as France. Conversely, certain connections with France are well documented, such as Franz Anton Danreiter’s period of study in Versailles. Under the leadership of the Salzburg Museum, the exhibition brings together loans from the Residenzgalerie Salzburg, the Salzburg Cathedral Museum, the art collections of St. Peter’s Archabbey, the Franciscan Monastery in Salzburg, the Parish of Bad Gastein, and the Benedictine Abbey of Kremsmünster. Together, these institutions contribute to the first major international presentation of Salzburg Baroque art outside Austria.