While in Rotterdam for the Malware exhibition, i crossed the Museum Park and visited Street Dreams. How Hiphop took over Fashion at Kunsthal Rotterdam.

Christopher Wallace (Biggie) & Sean Combs (Puff Daddy), 1996, Cover image VIBE September 1996 issue. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, New York

RUN DMC, It’s Tricky, 1986

Hip-Hop is more than a music style, it’s a movement that has left its marks on visual and performative culture. Its influence on fashion is particularly enduring. Sneakers, brash logos, hoodies, oversized clothing, bold gold jewellery and boom boxes on the shoulder. They are all associated with hip-hop and they are still here decades later. Apart from boomboxes. And big logos, unless you’re ironic.

Versions of the biblical episode on the flight into Egypt were very popular during the Renaissance. Although mentioned only briefly in the Bible, apocryphal legends were popular and formed the basis for most of the depictions, especially of the so-called Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Netherlandish masters like Memlinc and Gerard David led the way, and their versions could even be found in the homes of Venetian patricians. they also made their way to the New World.

Gerard David (c. 1460-1523) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1510. Oil on panel, National Gallery, Washington

The popularity of the “Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt” became an important factor in the development of landscape in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Artists, especially in the Netherlands, had to deepen and broaden their landscape background in order to incorporate the very popular apocryphal infancy legends into their work . Depictions of the Rest by these “northern” artists found their way into the palaces of Venetian patricians. Marcantonio Michiel even noted a depiction of “Our Lady with St. Joseph in the desert” by John Scorel of Holland in the home of Gabriele Vendramin, the owner of Giorgione’s Tempest.

Joachim Patenir: Rest on the Flight into Egypt Oil on panel, 1518-1520, Prado.