Anthony van Dyck's big, splashy painting of the mythical Rinaldo and Armida (1629) is one of the Baltimore Museum of Art's most treasured holdings, so it's hardly a surprise that it occupies pride of place in the central gallery of the museum's newly refurbished Jacobs Wing that reopens today.
Any invitation to reacquaint ourselves with van Dyck and the BMA's Old Masters is a welcome one. And the Jacobs Wing, $1.9 million and three years in the remaking, is a grand place for the visit.
A Grand Legacy: Five Centuries of European Art celebrates the reinstallation of the museum's Old Masters galleries, which house collections donated by Baltimoreans Jacob Epstein, George Lucas and Mary Frick Jacobs, among others.
The refurbished Jacobs wing follows on the success of the Cone Wing renovation, completed in 2001, which substantially redesigned the modern art galleries and reflected the BMA's continuing efforts to present its collections in more engaging, visitor-friendly ways.
As in the Cone Wing, formerly stark white walls have been repainted in warmer, more inviting blue, brown and muted cranberry tones, and oak floors have been restored to their original dark finish.
The exhibition layout of the wing's nine galleries has also been substantially updated, though unlike the Cone Wing, the basic architecture of the rooms has mostly stayed the same, except for a new second-floor entrance next to the main staircase that allows visitors access to the galleries from there as well as from the courtyard.
Entering the wing from the main staircase, a visitor passes first through a small medieval gallery housing art and artifacts from the 13th through the 15th centuries, including a magnificent limestone Virgin and Child and an enameled copper crucifix, both from France.
The medieval gallery gives way to the three main galleries. The long center gallery is devoted entirely to paintings and sculpture collected by Baltimore businessman Jacob Epstein: works by Titian, Veronese, Raphael, Tiepolo, Hals, Reynolds, Gainsbor-ough, Goya and Barye, among others, as well as van Dyck's celebrated painting, which once belonged to King Charles I of England and whose sale to Epstein in 1927 provoked a near scandal among the British public.
The Epstein gallery is flanked on both sides by additional galleries organized thematically around the broad themes of nature and the human form.
