Marietta Cambareri – författare

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston houses a world-famous collection of European painting and sculpture, including such masterpieces as Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Degas’s Little Dancer, Turner’s Slave Ship and the largest collection of paintings by Claude Monet outside of France. This overview features these well-known and much-loved works, divided into thematic chapters that represent major art movements, with an introduction that describes the phenomena that helped chart the course of art in the period. In all more than 100 highlights from this impressive collection are illustrated and discussed, each testifying to the richness and complexity of European art in the modern era. The MFA Highlights series presents the best of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collections accessibly and affordably. Its aim is threefold: to make available the greatest masterworks in the MFA; to provide an informative, readable overview of various artistic genres, cultures, and periods, for use by students, visitors, and scholars; and, over time, to create a library that will act as a general tour of world art through the ages.

The tremendous political, religious, and cultural changes that swept across Europe in the years from 1000 to 1800 fundamentally transformed the practices and purposes of painting and sculpture—from elaborately carved and gilded medieval Christian altars to Renaissance self-portraits touting the skill of the artist to eighteenth-century penetrating portraits in marble of the era’s leading thinkers. The one hundred highlights from the impressive European art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gathered here offer an accessible introduction to the story of art from the medieval period to the Enlightenment. Modern notions of art and artists, the art market, as well as the births of art history and the art museum as an institution, all trace their origins to Europe in these centuries, which produced work of fascinating variety and enduring beauty.