Drawing largely from the world-renowned collection of works on paper in the Fine Arts Museums’ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this exhibition examines a wide range of artworks from the 17th century. Complementing the upcoming Girl with a Pearl Earring at the de Young, opening in January 2013, Rembrandt’s Century sheds light on a fascinating roster of artistic personalities, both famous and forgotten, of the late Mannerist and Baroque eras. At its core is a generous selection of etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn—arguably his generation’s most influential artist.

Drawing upon the dynamic collection of San Francisco native Trevor Traina, this exhibition consists of approximately 100 works made by some of the pre-eminent artists working in photography this past century. While the core of the Traina collection embraces the documentary impulse in photography, it also tracks the medium’s full-blooded absorption into the world of contemporary art. Mixing rare black and white vintage prints of canonical images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, with luscious, eye-popping work in color by artists ranging from Stephen Shore and William Eggleston to Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, this exhibition celebrates photography’s fundamental richness and plasticity.

Musei Capitolini in Rome are lending San Francisco one of their greatest treasures, the remarkable Baroque masterpiece The Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), one of art history’s finest sculptors and a leading figure in Italian Baroque art and architecture. Recent conservation efforts have restored this sculptural triumph to its full glory and revealed previously hidden artistic techniques.

Believed to date from around 1638 to 1648, this extraordinary work takes its subject from classical mythology, as cited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It shows the beautiful Medusa, one of the Gorgon sisters, caught in the terrible process of transformation into a monster. The Medusa will be displayed exclusively in the U.S. at the Legion of Honor in the museum’s Baroque gallery 6, where it can be seen in context with the Museums’ great collections of paintings and sculpture from the era of Bernini.

For more than 50 years, Stephen De Staebler (1933–2011) created figurative sculptures primarily from clay—a medium derived from the primordial earth. Drawing inspiration from fundamental childhood experiences with nature, a transformative adolescent encounter with mortality, and adult studies in the histories of art and religion, he explored and extended a tradition of human representation that includes the religious monuments of ancient Egypt, the Renaissance humanism of Michelangelo’s finished and unfinished figures, and the modern existentialism expressed in the works of Alberto Giacometti. Matter + Spirit, installed in the American art galleries, includes 55 of De Staebler’s works.