Download Report - National Gallery of Art

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
CENTER FOR ADVANCED
STuDY IN THE VISuAL ARTS
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts,
founded in 1979, sponsors the study of the visual arts
in each of its four program areas: fellowships, research,
publications, and scholarly meetings.
During its thirty-second academic year, the Center welcomed
fellows from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Israel, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The topics of their research ranged from the study of
names and art in medieval Italy to cosmopolitanism in the
Sino-Mongol City, from pigments in Renaissance Venice
to South Indian mural paintings, and from Enlightenment
Spain’s Islamic craft heritage to rock-and-roll film musicals.
Three fellows dedicated their research to the art,
architecture, and cultural heritage of China.
The centenary of Japan’s gift of cherry trees to the
nation’s capital led to a rich and international celebration of
Japanese art and culture in the program of special meetings.
The Center worked together with the Freer and Sackler
Galleries to organize a series of public and scholarly events
around the exhibition Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-
Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800). The Center
also organized a Robert H. Smith Study Day in conjunction
with the Gallery’s exhibition Antico: The Golden Age
of Renaissance Bronzes. A planning retreat was held for the
National Committee for the History of Art, and CASVA
and the Gallery hosted four panel sessions, under the title
“Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy,”
during the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of
America. The Center also cosponsored, with University of
Maryland, the forty-second Middle Atlantic Symposium
in the History of Art.
In the program of publications, volume seventy-six
appeared in the series Studies in the History of Art.
Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic
Monument was edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke and supported
with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation. The essays included in the volume originated
at a two-part international symposium held in Washington
and in Florence, organized in conjunction with the loan to
the Gallery of three great sculptural commissions for the
exhibition Monumental Sculpture from Renaissance Florence:
Ghiberti, Nanni di Banco, and Verrocchio at Orsanmichele.
This year’s biennial Wyeth lecture, supported by the
Wyeth Foundation for American Art, was presented
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by Bryan J. Wolf of Stanford University on the topic
“Between the Lines: Philip Guston and ‘Bad Painting.’”
Professor Wolf also led an incontro to discuss the work
of Martin Puryear.
Marc Fumaroli (Collège de France) and Jacqueline
Lichtenstein (Université Paris-Sorbonne), the Center’s
joint Edmond J. Safra visiting professors, conducted a
three-day colloquy for emerging scholars and curators on
the subject of “The Academy of Painting and Sculpture
in the Ancien Régime: New Perspectives.”
The sixty-first A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine
Arts were delivered by Craig Clunas of the University
of Oxford on the topic “Chinese Painting and Its
Audiences.” Michael Fried’s and Kirk Varnedoe’s A. W.
Mellon Lectures were made available as Gallery podcasts.
Edited and fully illustrated versions of the Mellon
Lectures continue to be published in the Bollingen
Series by Princeton University Press, according to the
original wishes of Paul and Mary Mellon.
The Center’s ongoing research projects provide primary
research materials for the field. Under the direction
of Dean Elizabeth Cropper, the first volume in the
Malvasia project, which will make available an English
translation and new critical edition of Carlo Cesare
Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678), is in production
with Harvey Miller for Brepols. Professor Lorenzo
Pericolo (University of Warwick) serves as editor of
the critical edition. Associate Dean Therese O’Malley
is directing the construction of a database of images,
people, places, texts, and terms that expands upon her
book Keywords in American Landscape Design (2010).
Associate Dean Peter Lukehart and his team have been
developing a geotagging feature that will allow place
names mentioned in the Accademia di San Luca database
(www.nga.gov/casva/accademia) to link to historic
maps of Rome dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Both initiatives reflect the Center’s exploration
of digital humanities resources and depend upon the
expertise of a research associate specializing in digital
technologies for the history of art, supported by a grant
from Robert H. Smith.
For more on the Center’s programs, see the archive
of annual reports available online at www.nga.gov/
resources/casva.shtm.