The 2015 summer exhibition at the Louvre-Lens highlights the wealth of artistic exchanges between the capital of the Kingdom of France and what is now Tuscany, in the latter half of the 13th century.

Thanks to exceptional loans from around twenty prestigious European museums, the exhibition lifts the veil on the relationships between the major centres of artistic creation of the period: Paris, Florence, Siena and Pisa.

The exhibition brings together more than 125 exquisite works: monumental statuary, gold background paintings, illuminated manuscripts, fine enamels and ivories. In particular, these works reveal the influence of French exponents of High Gothic style on the Tuscan sculptors and painters of the late 13th century, within a cultural area that would become the cradle of the early Renaissance.

This exhibition at the Louvre-Lens will be the first to examine this phenomenon, which is of paramount importance to the history of art.