The quiet monumentality of pastoral life, a raging battle between spiritual virtue and the temptations of the physical realm, the frightening beauty of animals set upon one another are among the scenes envisioned and stories told in The Subject Is Art: 1400-1800. Drawing on the breadth of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture in the BAMPFA collections, the new exhibition on view in Gallery 5 looks at the temperament of art, conveyed through visual traditions and innovative artistic choices across centuries and continents. Among the nearly fifty works of art featured are southern and northern European works depicting biblical scenes and episodes from the lives of saints. The Old Testament heroine Judith triumphantly dominates in Il Cavaliere d'Arpino's Judith with the Head of Holofernes, painted in the first years of the seventeenth century in the rich Roman style of Caravaggio. Thirty years later and some 800 miles to the north, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Road to Calvary, a concise and dramatic scene of Christ carrying the cross. At the height of his prolific career, Rubens composed this dynamic oil sketch as a template for a later engraving, which would allow even greater distribution of his internationally sought-after work. The exhibition also includes portraits of figures known and unknown, ranging from Albrecht Dürer's exquisite sixteenth-century etching of Erasmus, the influential Dutch humanist who was the artist's contemporary, to eighteenth-century American artist John Brewster's quietly self-possessed Portrait of a Boy in Green. In addition, we encounter a rich universe of landscape traditions and approaches, from a seventeenth-century French idyll punctuated by figures from classical mythology, to a tranquil Japanese eighteenth-century scene in which figures appear to contemplate the essence of nature.
