The balcony of Warburg Hall overlooks reinstalled Renaissance art, including Guariento de Arpo's cross. The exhibit includes Netherlandish paintings (below right) and other works of the era.Photographs by Ilene Perlman

Warburg Hall, the largest exhibition space at the Fogg Art Museum, is once again home to the museum's extraordinary early Italian Renaissance paintings, one of the foremost such collections in North America. Suspended from the hall's 30-foot ceiling (replete with sixteenth-century carved wooden beams from Burgundy, France) hangs a cross by Paduan artist Guariento de Arpo.

For the last few years--during the displacement caused by the construction first of Werner Otto Hall, then of the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and finally of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies--Warburg Hall has served as storage and office space. (For a photograph of what it looked like when occupied by the conservation department, see page 63 of the May-June 1996 issue). The reinstallation, titled "Investigating the Renaissance," was designed by Winthrop curator Ivan Gaskell and intern Stephan Wolohojian, in conjunction with the Straus Center. Gaskell hopes to draw fresh audiences to these masterworks, and to create new modes of access for those already acquainted with them. Two smaller galleries provide historical background and explicate the techniques and iconography of Renaissance painting. There is even a display showing how to gild a frame (Renaissance frames are considered integral parts of the paintings), and another showing what sort of pigments were used to create the vivid colors so appealing to the modern, as well as the Renaissance, palette.