Notes on Contributors
Ianthi Assimakopoulou
is Adjunct Academic Staff at the Hellenic Open University. Her Postdoctoral research at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens has focused on the coexistence of mythological and historical narratives in the art of sixteenth-century Florence. In her work, she seeks to understand and interpret – occasionally through an interdisciplinary approach – the ‘inner life’ of images and how themes and motifs that originated in the Greco-Roman world reappear, often enriched with multiple layers of meaning, in the art of later periods and particularly in the Italian Renaissance. Her publications include over ten articles and book chapters, and she is currently curating an exhibition with digital material entitled Echoes of Antiquity in El Greco’s Oeuvre at the Basilica of Saint Mark in Heraklion, the birthplace of the artist.
Marina Belozerskaya
is an independent scholar and lecturer. She is currently a Senior Writer at UCLA. As cultural historian, her interests range from antiquity to the present, from art to exotic animals, from documentary to fictional genres. Born in Moscow, she earned her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago; participated in archaeological excavations in Greece and Italy; and explored hands-on marble and gem carving, and tapestry weaving. She has taught at Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, and UCLA; lectured widely; worked at the Agora Museum in Athens, Getty Museum, and LACMA; and was a Mellon, Kress, Bunting, Radcliffe, and Bogliasco Fellow. Her books include Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts Across Europe (Cambridge/New York 2002); Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Los Angeles 2005); The Arts of Tuscany: From the Etruscans to Ferragamo (New York 2008); The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (New York 2006); To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology (New York 2009); and Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese (Oxford/New York 2012). She is currently working on a novel set in the 16th-century.
Jean Cadogan
is Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College, Hartford CT. She was previously Charles and Eleanor Lamont Cunningham Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Her publications include Maestri Toscani del Quattrocento, ‘Biblioteca di Disegni’ volume 17 (Florence 1980); Wadsworth Atheneum Paintings II: Italy and Spain, Fourteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, for which she was the editor and principal author (Hartford 1991); Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (London/New Haven 2000), as well as articles on the history of Renaissance drawings, mural painting technique, and artisan families in Renaissance Florence. Her current book manuscript is titled Piety, Politics and Art: Mural Painting in Central Italy 1360-1480. It considers monumental painting in public places, including the cathedrals of Prato and Spoleto and the Campo Santo in Pisa, and explores themes of civic imagery, artistic diplomacy, and the prestige of Florentine painting.
Elena Capretti
graduated from the University of Florence, where she was a student of Professor Emerita Mina Gregori. A specialist in Florentine and Tuscan art of the 15-16th centuries, she is the author of numerous scholarly contributions to monographs, journals, museum catalogues, and exhibitions. Alongside these academic publications, she has produced textbooks and reference works for a wider readership. In addition, she has co-edited conference proceedings, compiled catalogue entries, and coordinated a number of editorial projects. Together with Serena Padovani and Daniela Parenti, she curated the exhibition Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1522. Pittore fiorentino “eccentrico” fra Rinascimento e Maniera. Under the supervision of Antonio Natali, this exhibition was on display at the Galleria degli Uffizi in 2015. She has collaborated with several public institutions – including the ‘Provincia di Firenze’ and the ‘Centro d’Eccellenza per la Comunicazione e Integrazione dei Media dell’Università di Firenze’– on projects aimed at spreading information on art history, architecture, and cultural heritage. For over 20 years, she has been involved with what is now the Educational Service Center at the Uffizi, promoting educational projects, informative materials, and activities. She also teaches at the Università dell’Età Libera del Comune di Firenze.
Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel
is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Humanities (Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia) at the University of Trent, Italy. Her research focuses on Christian iconography in Renaissance art, with particular attention to Marian imagery and its theological and devotional implications. She conceived and co-curated the exhibition AVE EVA. Ein wiederentdecktes Hauptwerk des Renaissancemaisters Guillaume de Marcillat (Gemäldegalerie Berlin, December 2013-May 2014).
Dennis Geronimus
is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at New York University, where he specializes in Italian Renaissance art. His research interests embrace the artistic crosscurrents between Italy and Northern Europe; art and the natural world; relationships between text and image; mythological narrative; pictorial wit and humor; and the artistic process and making as its own form of meaning. His publications include Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven/London 2006), and articles and reviews in Burlington Magazine, Art Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, and Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz. His work has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute, the ACLS, the RSA, the Warburg Institute, NYU’s Center for the Humanities, the NIKI in Florence, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, and the University of Oxford. His current book project, to be published by Yale University Press, reconsiders the career of Piero’s most precocious onetime student, Jacopo da Pontormo.
Guy Hedreen
is Amos Lawrence Professor of Art at Williams College (MA). He writes about ancient Greek art and culture and their modern interpretation. His scholarship has focused on Dionysiac art, myth, and ritual; the relationship between vase-painting and poetry; the Trojan War in ancient art and literature, and conceptions of primitive life. He has published three books, Silens in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting: Myth and Performance (Ann Arbor 1992); Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art (Ann Arbor 2001); and The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece: Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity (New York 2016). He is currently working on the relationship between ancient materialist theories of the origins of life and the visual arts, as well as the reception of those theories in the Italian Renaissance.
Sarah Blake McHam
is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University (NJ), whose research has focused on Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sculpture in Florence, Venice, and in the Veneto. Her latest book is the prize-winning Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History. A recent article (in Renaissance Quarterly, fall 2016) reinterprets Donatello’s High Altar in the Santo, and will be part of her next book about Paduan art in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries.
Anna Teresa Monti
graduated in the field of the ‘Preservation and restoration of paintings on canvas and wood’ from the Institute for Advanced Training of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in 1981. Since 2008, she and Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini have established a close collaboration, as both appreciate sharing their individual professional experiences and comparing their respective research projects. They collaborate on a permanent basis with a number of institutions that are under the aegis of the Italian Artistic Heritage. In Florence, more specifically, they work with the Galleria degli Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Museo Casa Martelli, the Palazzo Davanzati, the Opera di Santa Croce, the Opera di Santa Maria Novella, and the Museo Stefano Bardini.
Paula Nuttall
is a Course Director at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Learning Academy, and Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She has published widely on artistic relations between the Netherlands and Italy, most notably From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400-1500 (New Haven/London 2004), and in 2013 co-curated the exhibition Face to Face: Flanders, Florence and Renaissance Painting at the Huntington Collection, San Marino, California. In 2017 she was Scholar-in-Residence at the Dutch University Institute for Art History (NIKI), Florence.
Roberta J.M. Olson
is Curator of Drawings at the New-York Historical Society and Professor Emerita of Art History at Wheaton College (MA). Olson’s interdisciplinary research focuses on drawings, Italian Renaissance art, nineteenth-century art, and astronomical phenomena in art. Among her publications are Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman (New York 2015; Frick Center for the History of Collecting Book Prize 2017): Audubon’s Aviary: The Original Watercolors for ‘The Birds of America’ (New York 2012; AMMC Catalogue Prize 2013; Henry Allen Moe Prize 2014); Drawn by New York (New York 2008; AAMC Catalogue Prize 2008); The Florentine Tondo (Oxford 2000); Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science (Cambridge 1998); Italian Renaissance Sculpture (London1994); Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Italian Painting (Florence 1992); Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art (New York 1985), and Italian Drawings 1780–1890 (New York 1980). Forthcoming in 2019 are: Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe (London) and Artist in Exile: The Visual Diary of Baroness Hyde de Neuville (New York).
Lesley Stevenson
is Senior Paintings Conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. She undertakes research into a wide range of European artists’ materials and techniques examining paintings dating from 15th to 20th centuries.
Lisa Venerosi Pesciolini
graduated in the field of the ‘Preservation and restoration of paintings on canvas and wood’ from the Institute for Advanced Training of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in 1988. Since 2008, she and Anna Teresa Monti have established a close collaboration, as both appreciate sharing their individual professional experiences and comparing their respective research projects. They collaborate on a permanent basis with a number of institutions that are under the aegis of the Italian Artistic Heritage. In Florence, more specifically, they work with the Galleria degli Uffizi, the Galleria dell’Accademia, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Museo Casa Martelli, the Palazzo Davanzati, the Opera di Santa Croce, the Opera di Santa Maria Novella, and the Museo Stefano Bardini.
Elizabeth Walmsley
is Senior Painting Conservator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In addition to the restoration of old master paintings, she has published on the technique of Italian painters including Botticelli, Giorgione, Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian, as studied through technical examination, and on the history of painting restoration in the 20th century. She collaborated on a long-term project at the NGA to evaluate and improve camera systems for infrared reflectography and served as a technical editor for eight volumes of the NGA’s systematic catalogue. With Maria Clelia Galassi, she received a Samuel H. Kress Paired Fellowship in Art History and Conservation from CASVA and was awarded a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Conservation/Historic Preservation at the American Academy in Rome. Currently, she is part of the research team for the Verrocchio exhibition’s NGA venue in 2019.