New Translation
Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017), a Bollingen Series publication based on The Sixty-First A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts by Craig Clunas, has been translated into Chinese by Guangxi Normal University Press.
Learn more (in Chinese)
New Visiting Senior Fellowships
The creation of the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowships will support scholars researching historically underrepresented areas of art-historical study. The first cycle of fellowships will support those focusing on the arts of African Americans, Africa, and the African diaspora.
Read the press release
Learn more about CASVA Fellowships
Upcoming Publication
The Global Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History
Studies in the History of Art, Volume 82
Edited by Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen, summer 2020
Can the reception of a single, widely disseminated book offer a historical road map for a global art history? This is the question posed by the editors of this volume of essays, which charts the enduring response to the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, first published in German in 1915. Translated into 22 languages and still in print in many of them, Wölfflin’s book inaugurated an art history based entirely on “forms of seeing” and employing a comparative method. Many of the translators and transmitters of the text are represented in essays on the book’s readership in Europe, North and South America, and South and East Asia. From its reception, positive and negative, the first genealogy of a global art history emerges.
Postponed: 2020 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
Transparence and Ambiguity: The Modern Space of Axonometry
Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
Dates to be announced.
New Video Presentation
Cecilia Frosinini on Giotto's Madonna and Child (c. 1310/1315)
Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, 2013
From the series Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art
New Audio and Video
Wyeth Lecture in American Art
Art Is an Excuse: Conceptual Strategies, 1968–1983
Kellie Jones, Columbia University
New Dean Announcement
Professor Steven Nelson Announced as New Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
The National Gallery of Art announced the appointment of Steven Nelson as dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Nelson is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at CASVA (2018–2020), on leave from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is professor of African and African American art history and director of the UCLA African Studies Center. Nelson will become CASVA's third dean since its founding in 1979 and will succeed Elizabeth Cropper, who will retire in late May 2020. Nelson will begin his tenure in July.
New Audio and Video
Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art
Andrea Mantegna’s Stones, Caves, and Clouds
Gabriele Finaldi, National Gallery, London
From the Bulletin
Women in the Archive (PDF 423KB)
Biography is intrinsic to the field of art history with an extended and evolving tradition. Even so there remain inequalities in the study of artists' lives, linked to factors such as gender or race. The many voids in the historical account will only be filled through dedicated research, especially the archival documentation of lived experience. An invaluable resource, the archive continues to enrich the biographies of hitherto underrepresented or little understood individuals, including many early modern women artists. An article by Dean Elizabeth Cropper in the fall 2019 Bulletin frames the painter Artemisia Gentileschi as a case study of how archival discoveries can bring new dimensions to the life and work of a woman artist in early modern Italy, revealing greater artistic agency and professional standing. Cropper places this in the context of ongoing research at CASVA that contributes to evaluating and expanding the biographies of both the famous and the forgotten.
New Publication
Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice: Lives of the Bolognese Painters, Volume 9, Life of Guido Reni, 2 volumes
Edited by Elizabeth Cropper and Lorenzo Pericolo; Critical Edition, Translation, and Essay by Lorenzo Pericolo; Historical Notes by Lorenzo Pericolo, with Elizabeth Cropper, Stefan Albl, Mattia Biffis, and Elise Ferone; Corpus of Illustrations established by Lorenzo Pericolo, with Mattia Biffis and Elise Ferone
Learn more about the Malvasia Research Project.
New Publication
Center 39: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2018–May 2019 (PDF 11.1MB)
This year the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts welcomed fellows from China, Georgia, Italy, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The topics of their research ranged from forgery and counterforgery in early modern Chinese art to the fifteenth-century Veronese painter Pisanello, from representations of Napoleon Bonaparte in French visual culture to agency in nineteenth-century Dakhóta art, and from transformation of Iberian images of the Virgin in early colonial Lima to fabric architecture of the imperial court in the late Ottoman empire. Read more
New Endowment
$1 Million Received by the National Gallery of Art from the Edmond J. Safra Foundation to Endow the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
The National Gallery of Art announced a $1 million grant from the Edmond J. Safra Foundation to support the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professorship at CASVA. This generous gift coincides with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's endowment challenge grant to the National Gallery of Art on the occasion of the Gallery's 75th anniversary. Matching funds will permit the professorship to be fully endowed. See the press release for more information.
