Works of art exhibited in museums have been separated from their original settings and functions. Once a work enters a museum, it sheds its old life as an object of use (in worship, as an architectural support, etc.) and assumes a new life as an isolated object of visual interest. The exhibition, 'Mass and Masterpiece: Celebrating the Eucharist in the Renaissance and Baroque,' reconnected several paintings in the Ackland's European collection with their original religious contexts--with their "old lives." This nine-month exhibition centered on the Ackland's 'The Madonna and Child with Saints' attributed to Jacopo del Sellaio and 'Enthroned Madonna and Child with Saints' from the workshop of Cristoforo di Bindoccio and Meo di Pero and explored the important role altarpieces played in the celebration of the Eucharist in Catholic Europe of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. A third painting in the Ackland's collection, 'The Mass of St. Gregory,' circle of Lucas Cranach, together with liturgical books and objects on loan from the Rare Book Collection from Wilson Library and from the Reverend Monsignor Tim O'Connor, helps to illuminate the meaning of the Eucharist and the manner in which it was practiced in the Renaissance and Baroque.