Faculty

Kathleen Wren Christian

(PhD, Harvard University) director of graduate studies and assistant professor, Italian Renaissance art

Room 118A, Frick Fine Arts Building

Phone: 412-648-2407

Kathleen Christian specializes in Italian Renaissance art history. She completed her PhD with John Shearman on the topic of antiquities collections in Renaissance Rome, holding dissertation fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Warburg Institute. While finishing her dissertation she served as a curatorial graduate intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the department of Italian paintings. She has since held a post-doctoral fellowship in garden and landscape studies from Dumbarton Oaks, a nonresidential postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute, and a fellowship at the Villa I Tatti. At Pitt she has taught the graduate methodology seminar and courses on Italian Renaissance portraiture, Michelangelo, Venetian painting in the era of Giorgione, and the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. In the spring she will teach “The Global Renaissance,” a graduate seminar on art and globalism in the Early Modern period.

Selected publications:

Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350-1527 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), in press (2010).

Edited, with David Drogin, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), in press (2010).

“The Twelve Caesars,” entry for the Harvard Encyclopedia of the Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), in press.

“For the Delight of Friends, Citizens, and Strangers: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Drawings of Antiquities Collections in Rome,” in the conference acts of Die römischen Zeichnungen Maarten van Heemskercks, 1532-1536/37, in review.

"Archeology and the Recovery of Antiquity" in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ed. Michael Wyatt, in press.

"Landscapes of Ruin and the Imagination in the Antiquarian Gardens of Renaissance Rome." In Gardens and Imagination: Cultural History and Agency, edited by Michel Conan, 116-37. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Distributed by Harvard University Press), 2008.

"Instauratio and Pietas: The Della Valle Collections of Ancient Sculpture," in Studies in the History of Art. Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers, Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), ed. Nicholas Penny and Eike Schmidt, 33-65.

"Michelangelo's Bacchus and 'Forged' Ancient Sculpture in Renaissance Collections," in Common Ground: Archaeology, Art, Science, and Humanities: Proceedings of the XVI International Congress of Classical Archaeology, ed. Carol Mattusch, Alice Donohue, and Amy Brauer (Oxbow Books, 2006), 252-5.

"Poetry and 'Spirited' Ancient Sculpture in Renaissance Rome: Pomponio Leto’s Academy to the Sixteenth-Century Sculpture Garden," in Aeolian Winds and the Spirit of Renaissance Architecture, ed. Barbara Kenda (London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2006), 103-24.

"Raphael’s 'Philemon' and the Collecting of Antiquities in Rome," The Burlington Magazine 146 (2004) (Raphael issue), 760-63.

"The Della Valle Statue Court Rediscovered," The Burlington Magazine 145 (2003), 847-50.

"The De’ Rossi Collection of Ancient Sculpture, Leo X, and Raphael,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002), 132-200.

"From Ancestral Cults to Art: The Santacroce Collection of Antiquities," in Senso delle rovine e riusi dell’Antico, ed. Salvatore Settis, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Serie IV, Quaderni 14, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia (2002), 255-72.

"Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity in Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine," in Coming About... A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars Jones and Louisa Matthew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 33-40.

Honors/Awards:

Grants and Fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, Warburg Institute, Fulbright Foundation, Kress Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Villa I Tatti.

Current Research Projects:

Collections of Antique Sculpture in Renaissance Rome: my book Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, 1350-1527 is forthcoming with Yale University Press. This book traces the birth of the antiquarian collection in Rome and considers the reception of antiquities, in particular marble sculpture, from the era of Petrarch until the Sack of Rome. Themes treated in the book include: the question of how antique sculpture acquired new signification in the Tre- and Quattrocento by on-going comparison to historical and poetic genres of writing, the role of antiquities collections in the invention of fictive genealogies, the rituals of the private collection (such as banqueting and theatrical performances), and the contribution of Roman academies and literary societies to the history of collecting. The book also includes an appendix which maps out the history of the most important sculpture collections from the period.

The Muses and their Afterlife in post-Classical Europe: together with Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute) and Clare Guest (Agder University, Kristiansand) I am organizing a conference on the Muses and their afterlife which will be held at the Warburg Institute in London in October, 2009. The papers will consider the cultural, literary, and artistic survival of the Muses in antiquity and the transformations in Byzantine, Western medieval, and Renaissance Europe up to the end of the sixteenth century.

The Patronage of Sculpture in Renaissance Italy: with David Drogin (SUNY FIT), I am currently co-editing a collection of essays which reconsider the role of the patron in the production of sculpture during the Italian Renaissance. Issues discussed in the volume include social and political factors impacting the patronage of sculpture, the particularities of the medium of sculpture (its physical properties and longstanding traditions of religious and civic use) that shaped the history of its patronage, and the effects of new technologies of mechanical reproduction on traditional modes of commissioning sculpture.