Kathleen Christian specialises in Italian Renaissance art with a focus on the reception of antiquity in early modern Italy, the patronage, the display and collecting of sculpture, and garden history. After completing her dissertation at Harvard on antiquities collecting in Renaissance Rome, she was assistant professor of Italian Renaissance art for six years at the University of Pittsburgh. She joined the OU in 2012 after a semester as a guest lecturer at the University of Zurich. She has taught seminars on ‘The Global Renaissance’, Venetian painting, Antiquity in the Renaissance, methods of art history and other topics.
Her book Empire without End appeared with Yale University Press in 2010 and won the Society of Architectural Historians’ 2012 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award. Empire without End traces the birth of antiquities collecting in Rome and the reception of antique sculpture from the era of Petrarch until the Sack of Rome. It considers the question of how antique images in this era went from pagan idols to be smashed or re-used as building materials to ‘works of art’ displayed in collections, paying particular attention to the role of collecting in the invention of fictive genealogies, the paragone between sculpture and poetry, and the reception of antique sculpture by academic sodalities. The book includes a catalogue that maps out the history of the most important sculpture collections of this period. In 2010 she also published the co-edited volume Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture, which traces the appropriation of sculpture by private citizens, who adapted the medium’s long-lived associations with civic and ecclesiastical patronage in commissioning expensive works that encroached on public space.
She is currently co-editing the acts of the conference ‘The Muses and their Afterlife in post-Classical Europe to 1600’ held at the Warburg Institute in 2008 and pursuing research projects on Michelangelo’s Bacchus and mythological imagery in curial Rome, the reception of antique nymphs in early modern Italy, and the invention of Raphael’s artistic persona.
Dr. Christian has held predoctoral fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks and the Fulbright, an internship at the National Gallery of Art in the Department of Italian Paintings, and postdoctoral fellowships from the Getty, I Tatti and the Humboldt Foundation (at the University of Munich). She has recently given papers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin.
At the OU she is currently contributing to A226 Exploring Art and Visual Culture, AA315 Renaissance Art Reconsidered and the new MA in Art History.
Students interested in pursuing a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history should contact Kathleen Christian at the email address below. Topics related to the reception of antiquity, collecting, and cultural exchange in the early modern era are especially welcome.
Contact kathleen.christian@open.ac.uk
Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350-1527 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)
Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture, co-edited with David Drogin (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010
‘For the Delight of Friends, Citizens, and Strangers: Maarten van Heemskerck’s Drawings of Antiquities Collections in Rome’, in Tatjana Bartsch and Peter Seiler, eds, Rom zeichnen. Maarten van Heemskerck 1532-1536/37, Berlin, 2012, 129-156
‘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, 2010), 155–6
‘Landscapes of Ruin and the Imagination in the Antiquarian Gardens of Renaissance Rome’, Gardens and Imagination: Cultural History and Agency, ed. Michel Conan. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium Series in the History of Landscape Architecture (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2008), 116–37
‘Instauratio and Pietas: The Della Valle Collections of Ancient Sculpture’, in Studies in the History of Art 70. Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Symposium Papers, Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Penny and Eike Schmidt (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 33–65
‘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’, Burlington Magazine 146 (2004), 760–63
‘The Della Valle Statue Court Rediscovered’, 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. Walter Cupperi, 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. L. Jones and L. Matthew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2001), 33–40
See also Open Research Online for further details of Kathleen Christian’s research publications.
