MFA Highlights: European Painting and Sculpture before 1800

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.