Visualizing the Past in Italian Renaissance Art : Essays in Honor of Brian A. Curran

The essays in Visualizing the Past in Italian Renaissance Art address a foundational concept that was as central to early modern thinking as it is to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present. Written by the friends, students, and colleagues of Dr. Brian Curran, former professor of Art History at the Pennsylvania State University, these authors demonstrate how reverberations of the past within the present are intrinsic to the ways in which we think about the history of art. Examinations of sculpture, painting, and architecture reveal the myriad ways that history has been appropriated, reinvented, and rewritten as subsequent generations―including the authors collected here―have attained new insight into the past and present.

Contributors: Denise Costanzo, William E. Wallace, Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Cutler, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Louis Alexander Waldman, Elizabeth Petersen Cyron, Stuart Lingo, Jessica Boehman, Katherine M. Bentz, Robin L. Thomas, and John Pinto.

Jennifer Cochran Anderson, Ph.D. (2012, Pennsylvania State University) is an independent art historian working in Austin, Texas. She is currently preparing a book project on the historical “afterlives” of Ireland’s wooden devotional sculptures dating to the Lordship (1177–1542) and Suppression (1535–1800) eras.

Douglas N. Dow, Ph.D. (2006, Pennsylvania State University) is Associate Professor of Art History at Kansas State University. He is the author of Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform (2014); his next book examines Bernardino Poccetti’s religious paintings.