The January 2000 purchase of Cavaliere d’Arpino’s exquisite “Perseus rescuing Andromeda” by Judith W. Mann, curator of European art before 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, stimulated the creation of her magisterial exhibition “Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred, 1530-1800,” on view at the museum until May 15. The 74 works on view were chosen from a checklist of more than 1400 examples identified over the course of the last 20 years.

The basic techniques of painting on stone had been known for centuries, but they were single-handedly reinvigorated by one great 16th-century artist, Sebastiano del Piombo, whose biographer Giorgio Vasari celebrated his “discovery” while another contemporary lauded Sebastiano’s goal “to make a picture nothing less than eternal.”