Invented and refined in the early sixteenth century, and achieving widespread popularity and usage in the eighteenth century, the pastel is one of the most expressive and adaptable media in art history, surviving nearly unchanged for five centuries of human creativity and design.

Furio Rinaldi, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will illustrate the evolution of pastel through some masterworks currently on view in the exhibition Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, October 9th, 2021-February 13th, 2022), while Laura Da Rin Bettina will explore the complex origins of the medium in Renaissance Italy.