Baroque Art Gallery

This space, strategically located at the center of the first floor galleries, displays the museum's collection of seventeenth-century European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. Here visitors will find works reflecting the diversity of style, scale, and subject that characterizes the Baroque. Selections from the permanent collection include large dramatic altarpieces originally intended for Catholic churches, for example Giovanni Battista Vanni's Holy Family with St. John the Baptist or Giuseppe Ghezzi's Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, as well as large-scale religious sculpture including an anonymous Austrian wood carving of St. Florian. These works of art, full of drama, dynamism, and fervor, reflect the seventeenth-century resurgence of the Catholic Church brought about by the Counter-Reformation.

Sounding a quieter note are the landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of Dutch burghers, for example Michiel van Mierevelt's Portrait of a Lady, which reflects the difference in national sensibilities between north and south, Catholic and Protestant. The acceleration of interchange between northern and southern artists during the seventeenth century produced art which captured a vibrant mix of artistic styles. This is evident in both Master Jacomo's Denial of St. Peter and the anonymous Dutch painting entitled Italianate Landscape with Classical Ruins. The large number of quality works which display artistic cross currents suggests that international religious and political differences did not hinder creative dialogue among artists from different nations.

In addition to works from the museum's permanent collection, from time to time the Baroque Art Gallery will feature outstanding works on loan from distinguished private collectors.