Professor Emeritus, Art History
School of Humanities

Renaissance and Baroque art

My research concentrates on painting and drawing of the Early Modern period, as the Renaissance and Baroque era is now increasingly called. Although one line of research that I have been pursuing involves how meaning is conveyed at a time when the appearance of paintings becomes more and more "natural and realistic" (Pieter Breughel's Winter Landscape with Skaters and Birdtrap or Caravaggio's Uffizi Bacchus), my interests have lately turned away from individual artists to larger social practices. Consequently my recent projects have ranged from how art was replicated and marketed to where artists worked and what this space was called--a seemingly insignificant detail but in fact quite revealing at a time when they struggled to change their status from "craftsmen" to "artists"--to how they interacted and socialized with one another. This last point is the subject of my current work with George Bauer on early artists' academies, not the officially sponsored ones that are seen as the basis for later academic practice, but the many private ones artists often organized in the evenings in their own homes.

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https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2079

Last updated
04/08/2010