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Installation view of Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800

Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800

This audio guide highlights works of art demonstrating the extraordinary creativity of artists who selected stone panels as the supports for their paintings. Listen to a general introduction, narrators from the Saint Louis Art Museum, and a geologist from Saint Louis University.

  • Free Public Wi-Fi

    The Saint Louis Art Museum offers free Wi-Fi to visitors. From your device, access the SLAM_GUEST network.

    Large Print Labels

    Large-print labels are available on your own device and upon request at the Taylor Hall Welcome Desk.

    AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT

    The audio guide transcript is available to view on your own device.

  • To identify and explain the properties of the stone supports used by the artist’s featured in the exhibition, the Museum enlisted the expertise of John Encarnación, professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Saint Louis University. This resource is available online and in the Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800 catalogue appendix available in the exhibition.

Introduction

  • Speakers:  
     
    Min Jung Kim 
    Barbara B. Taylor Director 
    Saint Louis Art Museum 
     
    Judith Mann 
    Curator of European Art to 1800 
    Saint Louis Art Museum 

    Hello, I am Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

    I am delighted to welcome you to the audio guide for Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800, an exhibition we’ve organized to highlight a little-known aspect of 16th- and 17th-century artistic practice: the use of stone panels as supports for painted images. The exhibition you are about to experience is the culmination of 15 years of research undertaken by one of the curators here at the Museum. So, to tell you more, I would like to introduce Judith Mann, curator of European art to 1800.

    Thank you, Min. The 76 paintings that comprise the exhibition have been brought to St. Louis in order to demonstrate the extraordinary creativity of artists who selected stone panels as the supports for their paintings. They used a variety of stones, including slate, various marbles, amethyst, porphyry, jasper, limestones, and lapis lazuli, and they did so to enrich and deepen the meaning of their artistic productions as well as to make works that delight the eye and incorporate the markings of the stone into their work.

    Many of these paintings have never been on public display. All of them document an aspect of the creative endeavor of early modern European artists who were exploring the possibilities of a creative relationship between the products of their own hand and those aspects of the natural world that they understood as having been fashioned by God.

    This exhibition audio guide offers commentaries from three of us who have worked on this show. In addition to my voice, you will be hearing from Andrea Miller, research assistant in the Department of European Art to 1800, and John Encarnación, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Saint Louis University.

    We encourage you to experience this guide in any order you like; you may follow it in numeric order or pick and choose. Each featured object can be located by following the floorplan on this webpage or by identifying the audio icon on the object’s label in the exhibition. Whether you’re listening from home or in the Museum galleries, I hope you enjoy this audio guide and your visit to Paintings on Stone.

  • Gallery Text

    You must know that our own Sebastianello has discovered a secret of painting on beautiful marble, which allows him to make a picture nothing less than eternal. 

    These words, written on June 8, 1530, are the earliest evidence that the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) was painting on stone. Influenced by Sebastiano, other artists who worked in or visited Rome also started using stone supports for their small painted artworks.

    Beginning in the 1570s, first in Venice and then elsewhere, artists routinely left parts of the stone painting surface bare. Initially, they preferred dark stone, contrasting light tones against black backgrounds for visual and spiritual effects. By the mid-1590s, when more types of stone became available, painters used rocks with interesting coloration and markings, leaving some surface unpainted in order to include these natural elements in their finished designs.

    This exhibition offers an introduction to the 16th-century European practice of painting on stone surfaces. Many of the works on view showcase the creative ways that painters incorporated stone into their visual vocabulary. Early examples of paintings on stone include portraits, narratives, and religious scenes where the entire stone support is covered with paint.

    Subsequent galleries feature artists whose approach beautifully integrates the unique markings and dramatic coloration of the stone surface into their finished work. These paintings, both rich in meaning and striking in appearance, highlight a practice previously overlooked and shed new light on this aspect of European artistic culture.

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