CHESTNUT HILL, MASS.- The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College is presenting three exclusive exhibitions this fall, which showcase Medieval and Renaissance Italian paintings from a renowned private collection, many unseen publicly since the nineteenth century; and from the Museum’s permanent collection, outstanding Belgian landscape paintings, and 1950s–1960s photographs by the late Nobel Prize-winning theoretical chemist Martin Karplus.

Organized by the McMullen, the exhibitions are on display from September 2 through December 7, 2025. Also featured in the Museum’s Daley Family Gallery is a new, large-scale acquisition by Spanish artist Ela Fidalgo and contemporary works on paper by influential American artists Jim Dine and Frank Stella, all from the McMullen Museum’s permanent collection.

Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting, Daley Family Gallery

The closing centuries of the Middle Ages in Italy witnessed profound transformations in the art of painting. New techniques gave way to an expanded repertoire of formats and artistic styles; patronage systems and workshop practices evolved in tandem with reassessments of the merit of authorship; and long-standardized criteria for value and authenticity in representation were steadily redefined. These paradigm-shifting developments—exemplified in Early Italian painting—ramified into the academic study and connoisseurship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating a blurry line between the Medieval period and early modernity that has proven difficult to shake.

Medieval | Renaissance foregrounds this distinction, exhibiting nineteen rarely shown works from the Frascione Collection in Florence, Italy, founded in 1893. Featuring devotional icons, altarpiece panels, narrative scenes, and portraits from the late thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, the exhibition charts innovations in the craft and conceptualization of painting in Italy after 1300. These paintings represent a liminal epoch between the later Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance, whose works and artists are shared—even “claimed”—by two divergent art historical fields, “Medieval” and “Renaissance,” with their own cultures, questions, and interpretive methods.

“We thank the Frascione Collection for generously enabling the McMullen to present to visitors these fine and remarkably well-preserved Italian works—many unseen publicly since the nineteenth century—for study, teaching, and scholarly research,” said Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston Director of the McMullen Museum Nancy Netzer, a professor of art history at Boston College. “We hope this exhibition inspires new discoveries and deepens the ongoing dialogue about the divide between the Middle Ages and early modernity.”

Curated by BC Assistant Professor of Medieval Art John Lansdowne and Professor of Renaissance Art History Stephanie C. Leone, the exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the works through two distinct art historical lenses and from either side of a long-standing and long-debated disciplinary divide.

“We are thrilled to introduce an exceptional selection of Early Italian paintings, from the Frascione Collection in Florence,” they said of the exhibition, which has been underwritten by BC with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum. “This exhibition opens up exciting possibilities to think deeply, ask questions, and reflect on how the language we choose to categorize works of art continues to frame our understanding of history.”

A Fresh Vision: Landscape Painting in Belgium after Romanticism; The School of Tervuren in an International Context

Daley Family Gallery

A Fresh Vision celebrates a recent gift of thirty-six outstanding paintings from the School of Tervuren from Charles Hack and the Hearn Family Trust, a gift that establishes the McMullen as home to the leading collection of nineteenth-century Belgian landscape painting in North America. The exhibition explores the School of Tervuren, a group of Belgian artists who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, turned their gaze to the quiet forests and fields near Brussels. It examines how artists rejected academic convention and the growing spectacle of modern urban life to embrace the natural world as a source of truth, beauty, and renewal. Also on display are seven French, American, and Dutch works from the McMullen collection.

“This exhibition celebrates a recent landmark gift to the McMullen by inviting our visitors to explore some of the finest examples of nineteenth-century Belgian Romantic/realist landscape painting, presented in dialogue with their French, Dutch, and American counterparts,” said Netzer.

The exhibition also demonstrates how the Tervuren painters, including Theodore Fourmois, Hippolyte Boulenger, Joseph-Théodore Coosemans, and Théodore T’Scharner, were influenced by the French Barbizon painters to blend Romantic sensibility with realist technique, capturing the nuances of light, weather, and terrain in a modern, expressive style. Painting outdoors—enabled by the recent invention of paint tubes, and motivated by Romantic poetry and new scientific concepts of nature—they brought a fresh immediacy to landscape painting.

Though loosely defined, the School of Tervuren represents a vital chapter in the international evolution of modern landscape. Like their contemporaries in Barbizon and Giverny in France, Skagen in Denmark, and the Hudson River Valley of New York, these artists believed in portraying nature as they saw and felt it, in the moment. This exhibition places Belgian landscape painting in conversation with wider European and American movements, inviting visitors to experience the power of place—and of painting—as a quiet yet radical form of resistance and renewal. Comparisons with selected works by Barbizon artists such as Charles-François Daubigny, and artists associated with the Hudson River School, like Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett, from the McMullen collection introduce international parallels.

“This impressive group of works, a generous gift from the premier private collection of Belgian art in the United States, illustrates an important chapter in the evolution of landscape painting in nineteenth-century Europe and America,” according to curator Jeffery Howe, BC professor emeritus of art history. “The artists associated with the School of Tervuren shared the renewed passion for landscape painting that grew from Romantic and scientific interpretations of nature, building on the deep roots of Belgian and Flemish art history.”

Martin Karplus: Moments and Monuments

Monan Gallery

This exhibition presents fifty-two digital prints of photographs taken by Martin Karplus during his travels across Europe and the Americas in the 1950s and 1960s, which capture scenes that are both timeless and fleeting. These images reflect Karplus’s remarkable eye for color and composition, offering a window into the post-war world as seen by a deeply humanistic and inquisitive mind.

Born in Vienna in 1930, Karplus emigrated to the United States with his family in 1938. He studied chemistry and physics at Harvard and completed his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1953. Karplus began developing his photographic skills later that year during his postdoctoral studies in Oxford, traveling throughout the UK and continental Europe, shooting in Kodachrome slide film. Though he had no plans to exhibit his work at the time, his natural photographic eye and his curiosity about the people and places he visited combined to produce work of charm and depth. He continued taking pictures while building an illustrious career in theoretical chemistry that would be recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2013.

Prior to his 2024 death, Karplus and his wife, Marci, made a significant gift of 134 digital prints to the McMullen Museum of works from the first two decades of his photographic practice. These include some of his earliest surviving images from Oxford and London, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the then-newly formed Republic of Yugoslavia. A second group of works documents his travels across the Americas, with vivid images from the Southwestern United States, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil.

“We are delighted to present a selection from the Karpluses’ generous gift of remarkable works in our current exhibition,” said Netzer. “Rendered in vivid color, the photographs offer a rare and nuanced glimpse of everyday life across cities on three continents during two decades after the Second World War.”

Added curator John McCoy, McMullen Museum assistant director of multimedia & design services, “Martin Karplus was a photographer with a natural gift for color and composition. He also happened to visit many fascinating sites all over the world, always with an interest in people engaged in the business of life.”