BALTIMORE — Mark McDonald peered closely at the 15th century hand-colored print of St. Jerome by Albrecht Durer, then examined the black-and-white version of the same work hanging next to it. McDonald wanted to get a good look; after all, he'd traveled across an ocean to see them side by side.
An art historian and curator at the British Museum, McDonald has spent a lifetime specializing in prints made during the 15th and 16th centuries -- the great Age of Discovery. And the works he traveled to see this week at the Baltimore Museum of Art's new show "Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color," are among the rarest and most beautiful examples of their type in the world.
"This is possibly one of the most important print shows in the last 20 years," the curator said earlier this week as he strolled through the galleries. "It's a completely new and fresh subject, and I'm quite stunned by it."
The BMA show, put together by prints and drawings curator Susan Dackerman, has created quite a stir in the art world. As a result of meticulous research in historical archives, Dackerman has presented an astonishing thesis: that printed images, which first became widely popular during the 15th and 16th centuries, were from the start not only made in black and white, but also in brilliantly colored versions that until now have remained largely unknown.
