Ana Debenedetti - Botticelli Past and Present

Ana Debenedetti is an art historian specialising in Florentine art, artistic literature and workshop practice in the Renaissance. She is Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, responsible for the collections of paintings, drawings, watercolours and miniatures. She has written and published on Renaissance art, philosophy and poetry, and holds a PhD in History of Art focusing on the artistic and cultural milieu of Quattrocento Florence, especially the interaction between philosophy and artistic literature through the work of Marsilio Ficino (143399). She co-curated the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master (V&A, 201415) and Botticelli Reimagined (V&A, 2016), and was co-author of the accompanying catalogue. Current projects include a display and a catalogue of French Master drawings in the V&A, and a book on Botticelli (Reaktion books).

Caroline Elam is an art historian who has published widely on architecture, art and patronage in the Italian Renaissance. She has held academic positions at the University of Glasgow, Kings College, Cambridge and Westfield College, University of London. From 1987 to 2002 she was Editor of The Burlington Magazine. From 2002 to 2004 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor for the History of Art at the Center for Advanced Studies for the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. She has held a fellowship and visiting professorships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, and was awarded the I Tatti Mongan Prize in 2003. She is an honorary fellow of Kings College, Cambridge. Her book Roger Fry and Italian Art is scheduled for publication in 2019.

Michelle OMalley is Deputy Director and Professor of the History of Art at the Warburg Institute. She is particularly interested in issues of commissioning, pricing, production and quality in Italian Renaissance art. She has published numerous articles and is author of The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (Yale 2005) and Painting under Pressure: Fame, Reputation and Demand in Renaissance Florence (Yale 2013). She is the co-editor of The Material Renaissance (2007) and Re-thinking the Renaissance Object (2009). Her most recent research considers the work of Alessandro Botticelli and his assistants, specifically in terms of economics, ownership and production practices in the workshop.

Patrizia Zambrano is Professor of Modern Art History at Universit del Piemonte Orientale, Italy. She is co-author of the 2004 monograph on Filippino Lippi, and author of many articles, reviews and contributions to exhibition catalogues, several of them devoted to Botticelli. In 2005 she wrote a book on Bernard Berenson and the creation of Amico di Sandro, between Filippino Lippi and Sandro Botticelli. She was on the board of advisors for the exhibition Filippino Lippi e Sandro Botticelli nella Firenze del 400 (Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale, 2011) and contributed to the catalogue. Over the last five years she has given several lectures on Botticelli rediscoveries, on connoisseurship, and on the birth and developments of Italian Renaissance individual portrait in the fifteenth century. She is preparing a book on Botticellis portraiture, after having contributed to the 2010 exhibition on the artist at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, writing about the Giuliano de Medici portraits. She has always also maintained an interest in antique frames and in the story of conservation in nineteenth-century Italy, and has published extensively on these subjects.

Nicola Costaras is Head Paintings Conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She trained at Gateshead Technical College (now the University of Northumbria) and joined the V&A in 1996. Prior to that position, she worked at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague for six years. She graduated with an MA in Medieval Cultures from Birkbeck College, University of London in 2008. The major projects she has worked on at the V&A include the British Galleries (2001), Paintings Galleries (2003), Medieval & Renaissance Galleries (2009), Europe Galleries (2015), and, most recently, the exhibition Botticelli Reimagined.

Clare Richardson is a specialist in infrared imaging. As a partner in Tager Stonor Richardson, she has undertaken infrared imaging for public and private collections since 2002. She trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and has also worked at the Institute as a lecturer and research fellow. Her research interests include the early works of Rubens and nineteenth-century painting. Clare was Senior Manager, Painting, Frame and Paper conservation at Royal Museums Greenwich from 2015 to 2017. Prior to this she was at the V&A for five years, working on projects including a large touring exhibition of Constable Sketches, the Europe Galleries and Botticelli Reimagined at the V&A.

Paul Holberton completed his PhD at the Warburg Institute in 1989, after obtaining degrees in Classics (Cambridge) and Art History (London). His first publication was on Botticellis Primavera in the JWCI (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes) in 1982. His last article was published in 2004, since when he has been writing a book on A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature: Idyll and Idleness, spinning off into occasional papers, two of which are in press. He is a partner in Paul Holberton Publishing Ltd, which specialises in art books.