Notes on Contributors
Maria Eletta Benedetti
graduated in Art History from the University of Florence in 2017 with a thesis entitled “La bottega di Sandro Botticelli (1490–1510): un problema critico ancora aperto.” In 2021 she obtained the Specializzazione in Beni Storico-Artistici diploma also from the University of Florence. Her research, “Ugo Bardini: antiquario di mestiere artista per diletto,” began with her internship at the Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico-Artistici, which took place at the Bardini Archive. She has worked in the fields of education and accessibility at Palazzo Strozzi and the Fondazione CR Firenze, and currently works as a museum operator in Perugia, within the museum complex of the Isola di San Lorenzo. Her selected publications include “Botticelli, Incoronazione della Vergine di Villa La Quiete” (Montevarchi, 2018) and “Nascita e distruzione di un’abbazia perugina” in Storie di pagine dipinte, ed. Stella Sonia Chiodo (Palazzo Pitti, 23 giugno 2020–4 ottobre 2020).
Denise M. Budd
is Professor of Art History at Bergen Community College. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2002, with her dissertation focused on the documentary evidence relating to the early career of Leonardo da Vinci. Building upon her interest in archival investigation and the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century art market, her current research seeks to reconstruct the career and international network of the Washington, D.C.-based tapestry dealer Charles Mather Ffoulke. She has contributed to two previous volumes of this series with the essays, “Charles Mather Ffoulke and the Market for Tapestries in Late Nineteenth-Century America” (2017) and “The Barberini Tapestries and the Dealers’ Network” (2020). She has also written on the frequently long-standing relationships between Ffoulke and his clients, including Larz Anderson (2021) and Phoebe Hearst (forthcoming).
Lynn Catterson
received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2002, which began with an interest in Italian Renaissance sculpture focusing on the marketplace and how fifteenth-century sculptors satisfied consumer demand for antiquities. For the past ten years she has worked on the art market in nineteenth-century Florence from the point of view of production and social network via its preeminent dealer, Stefano Bardini. The project has drawn from all of the material in the state archive of the Bardini family and business, examining the structure and operational strategies of his vast international business. In addition to editing two other volumes in this Brill series, she is the author of numerous publications on different aspects of Bardini & Co., as well as, most recently, the Bardini entries for Grove/Oxford Art Online and Bloomsbury Art Markets – Protagonists, Networks, Provenances (formerly De Gruyter Art Market Dictionary).
Paola Cordera
is Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. She earned her Ph.D. in 2014 at the Politecnico di Milano and Université Sorbonne-Paris 1 with a thesis on the art dealer and collector Frédéric Spitzer and his museum. Her work on Spitzer was published in 2014 as the first monograph on this subject and it has been disseminated widely at conferences and in articles. Her research draws upon a multidisciplinary background developed over time through several projects and publications in the field of museums and cultural heritage. Her research interests lie in Medieval and Renaissance art, architecture and decorative arts and their reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections, and in the history of the taste and the art market. In 2016 she was the Leon Levy Fellow at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library, where she researched the reception and sales of Spitzer’s collection of decorative arts in the United States. In recent years her work has been supported by grants from the Getty Research Institute, INHA (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art) and the Kress Foundation International Travel Grant. She is currently Principal Investigator on the VO Project. Project Voices (2021–22). Focusing on the traveling exhibition Italy at Work (1950–54), this project explores the actors, networks, strategies, and actions contributing to the promotion of Italian industry and decorative arts production (and the Italian lifestyle) in the context of its celebrated past and in the framework of post-war Marshall Plan funding in Europe.
Martha Dunkelman
received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts with H.W. Janson as her advisor. Since that formative experience, she taught at Wright State University as well as at the University at Buffalo and at Canisius College in Buffalo where she chaired and expanded the art history program. Most of her publications and presentations have been on works by Donatello and Michelangelo, and more recently on historic plaster casts, including “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Donatello and America’s Self-image,” in Sculpture Journal 31.4, 2022. She is currently working on a book about the fate of the historic plaster cast collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
MacKenzie Mallon
is the Provenance Specialist at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where she coordinates provenance research on the museum’s collection. Her primary research interests are World War II-era provenance, the history of collections, and increasing transparency in the reporting of provenance research results. At the Nelson-Atkins, Mallon curated the provenance-based exhibitions Discriminating Thieves: Nazi-Looted Art and Restitution (2019) and Origins: Collecting to Create the Nelson-Atkins (2021) and has published several articles on the history of the museum and its collections. In addition to her provenance research, she enjoys serving as a speaker and moderator at provenance research-related programs and keeping up with her three sons.
Jacqueline Marie Musacchio
is Professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art at Wellesley College. Her previous scholarship, including her books The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 1999) and Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (Yale University Press, 2008), focused on the intersection of female experience and material culture in Renaissance Italy. This essay, however, is part of her current book project, with the working title At Home Abroad, which examines the women artists who traveled from the United States to Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Lorenzo Orsini
studied at the University of Florence, receiving an M.A. in art history 2018 and a specialization diploma in art-historical heritage in 2021. Since 2015, he has worked on the history of restoration and the art market in post-unification Italy, focusing on Stefano Bardini and his collection of detached wall paintings. His research has been presented at national and international conferences (Stefano Bardini estrattista, 2019; Soffitti lignei nel mercato antiquariale italiano, 2020) and published in major periodicals (Bollettino d’Arte, 2019). He has also contributed to the catalogs of two exhibitions held at Palazzo Pitti, Florence (I nipoti del re di Spagna, 2017; Storie di pagine dipinte, 2020).
Kerri A. Pfister
is a Photoarchive Collection Specialist at The Frick Collection, Frick Art Reference Library. She received her M.A. from Columbia University in 2009 with a thesis on the challenges of casting large-scale bronze sculptures in fifteenth-century Florence via the case study of Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. She also received a M.S.L.I.S from Long Island University in 2012 specializing in Special Collections and Archives and Records Management. Her current research, based on archival documents, focuses on the history of collecting of Medieval and Renaissance sculpture and its reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections and art market. She has given several papers on the social networks among the dealers, scholars, and private collectors of sculpture.
Eliot W. Rowlands
is a New York-based, independent art historian, specializing in early Italian painting and the history of collecting in America. He earned his Ph.D. in 1983 from Rutgers University, with a dissertation on Fra Filippo Lippi, and was an Associate Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, in 1985–86. He was a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 1986 to 1993 and was senior researcher at the international firm of Wildenstein & Co. for over twenty-five years. Among his publications are The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Italian Paintings, 1300 to 1800 (1996); Masaccio, Saint Andrew and the Pisa Altarpiece (2003); as well as numerous scholarly articles. He is currently engaged on a book on Harold Woodbury Parsons, who served as the agent for European art for several midwestern museums (including the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), as well as a host of private collectors. For this project he received a Leon Levy Senior Fellowship from the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library in 2017.
Joanna Smalcerz
received her Ph.D. from the University of Bern in 2017. She works on the history of the Italian art market and collecting in the late nineteenth century, the reception of Italian Renaissance art, and the intersection of art historical scholarship and the nineteenth-century politics of heritage. She worked on the Project for the Study of Collecting and Provenance at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles before lecturing at the University of Bern and the University of Basel. She is the author of Smuggling the Renaissance: The Illicit Export of Artworks Out of Italy, 1861–1909, which was published by Brill in 2020. Her awards include fellowships from the Bibliotheca Hertziana –Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and the Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw and Associated Researcher at the University of Bern.