Maia Wellington Gahtan - Monographic Exhibitions and the History of Art

The idea for this book developed from a graduate course and conference held in Florence at Istituto Lorenzo de Medici, department of Museum Studies, and the University of Florence, SAGAS department in March and April 2016. We are appreciative of all of the students, specialist lecturers and conference participants whose lively exchanges of ideas encouraged us to bring this volume together, as well as the musical ensemble Ensemble Harmonicus Concentus, whose concert demonstrating the recovery of Vivaldis music through monographic concert series was both apt and enjoyable.

We would especially like to thank Fabrizio Guarducci, President of the Istituto Lorenzo de Medici, and Carla Guarducci, General Director of the Istituto Lorenzo de Medici, for their generous support of the MA in Museum Studies Program and its academic initiatives, Vanessa and John Peters and Richard Lewis of Marist College, with which our Museum Studies program is partnered, along with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the University of Florence, SAGAS department. From within Lorenzo de Medici, special thanks must be accorded to Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Myra Stals, and Lauren Piccolo for their crucial organizational help with the conference and brainstorming afterwards and to one of our graduate assistants, Jennifer Bauder, who helped organize the materials for this book.

At the University of Florence, we would like to express gratitude to the director of the SAGAS department, Stefano Zamponi, to Andrea De Marchi, professor of the SAGAS Department, for introducing the conference, and to Dario Abbate for the help in the practical organization.

Maia Wellington Gahtan is Program Director of the M.A. in Museum Studies and Professor of Art History and Museology at the Istituto Lorenzo de Medici in Florence. She received her B.A. in both history of art and linguistics (1987) and her Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from Yale University (1995). Formerly a curator at Walters Art Museum, her scholarly interests concentrate on the history of collecting and museums and more generally on the interplay between intellectual/cultural history and the representational arts, especially of the Early Modern period. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Villa I Tatti, she has curated exhibitions and edited several books: Vasaris Florence (1994), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum (2012, Italian; 2014, English), Churches, Temples, Mosques, Places of Worship or Museums? (2012), Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World (with Donatella Pegazzano, 2015), and has contributed to various books of essays, conference proceedings and major scholarly journals.

Donatella Pegazzano is Associate Professor of Museology and History of Collecting at the Universit degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Storia, Archeologia, Geografia, Arte e Spettacolo (SAGAS). Her fields of investigation are sixteenth-century Florentine and Roman collections through the analysis of cultural contexts based on ancient literature and archival sources. Her attention has been focused on patrons of art and collectors who concentrated on ancient and modern works of art and particularly on sixteenth-century sculpture (Giambologna, Pietro Francavilla). She is the author of essays on Bindo Altoviti (2003), Jacopo Corsi (2010), and Vasari as curator of Medici Collections (2011). She has also participated in national and international congresses on the history of collecting.

Konstantinos Stefanis is an art historian/researcher employed at the E. J. Finopoulos Collection (Benaki Museum, Athens), which specialises in history and travel literature in the broader Hellenic world from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Konstantinos studied art history in London: Camberwell College of Arts (B.A.), Goldsmiths College (M.A.), The London Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of London (Ph.D.). His Ph.D. thesis researched the emergence and early development of the single-artist retrospective exhibition in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Artists in Retrospect: The Rise and Rise of the Retrospective Exhibition explored a period of roughly a hundred years (17601867) and demonstrated the historical complexities of the nascent exhibition format. His current research interests are in exhibition culture and collections, print culture (esp. catalogues), and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.

Ruth E. Iskin s The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s1900s was published in 2014 (Dartmouth Press) and her Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting in 2007 (Cambridge University Press; Chinese edition, 2010; English paperback, 2014). She is the editor of Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (Routledge, January, 2017), and co-editor of the forthcoming Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World . Iskin obtained her Ph.D. from UCLA, and her articles appeared in journals such as the Art Bulletin , Discourse , Visual Resources , Nineteenth-Century Art World Wide , Nineteenth-Century Contexts, The Womans Art Journal , and in anthologies and museum catalogues, most recently in a catalogue by the Guggenheim Bilbau and by the Museu de Arte de So Paulo. Her writings have been translated into Chinese, Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Spanish, Basque language, and Portuguese. Her work has been supported by CASVA, among others. Professor (Em.), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of the Arts, she currently lectures in Israel and abroad.

Kate Kangaslahti is a Research Fellow in the research group Cultural History since 1750 at KU Leuven. She completed her Ph.D. in the history of art at the University of Cambridge and has worked at the British Museum in London and at the School of Art, Design, and Media, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She is currently researching a book on the editor and publisher Christian Zervos, focusing on the iconographical archive of modern art and architecture he compiled and its global diffusion under the cover of his review, Cahiers dArt . More generally, her published research addresses the relationship between art and politics in France in the first half of the twentieth century, with particular reference to cultural constructions of national identity, the situation of foreign artists practising in France, the art and architecture of the international Expositions, and the role of the art press between the wars.