N A T I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A R T • B U L L E T I N

In November 2010 the seventh Inter-national Fine Print Dealers Associa-

tion Book Award for excellence inscholarship in the field of fine printswas presented to Peter Parshall, editorof The Woodcut in Fifteenth-CenturyEurope. This collection of essays waspublished as volume lii of casvaSymposium Papers series and volume 75 in the larger series Studies in theHistory of Art. The symposium itrecords, which examined the technol-ogy, artistry, and economy of earlyprintmaking, was sponsored by theSamuel H. Kress Foundation in honorof Franklin D. Murphy. This took placein 2005 during the groundbreakingexhibition Origins of European Print-making: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public. The Gallery has had a deep interest in early printing sinceLessing J. Rosenwald gave his collectionto the nation in 1943, and both theexhibition catalogue and symposiumvolume are now indispensable forfuture research.

Romare Bearden, American Modernist,edited by Ruth Fine and JacquelineFrancis (Studies in the History of Art,volume 71), has just appeared. Thisbrings new understanding of a greatAmerican artist who was the subject of a monographic exhibition and relatedcasva symposium at the NationalGallery some seven years ago. Suchsymposia, and their publication, bringinternational attention to the exhibi-tions they accompany, and expandgreatly upon the information providedin exhibition catalogues.

Other models for casva symposiahave evolved over the years. The Mall in Washington, 1781– 1991 (1991, repub-lished in 2002), and A ModernistMuseum in Perspective: The East Building

(2009) reflect casva’s mission to studythe built environment. Art and the EarlyPhotographic Album (Studies in the His-tory of Art, volume 77), also appearingthis spring, is the first treatment of theimportant topic of how albums of pho-tographs of works of art helped shapeboth art history and museums. Thissymposium grew out of the researches of Stephen Bann, former Edmond J.Safra Visiting Professor. The symposiumalso exploited the little-known riches ofthe Gallery’s image collections, whichBann explored while in residence.

Due to appear in 2012 is Orsanmicheleand the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument. A group of themost famous works of early Renais-sance sculpture from Orsanmichele in Florence was loaned to the NationalGallery in 2005 on the understandingthat such a scholarly symposium wouldtake place, and this event was an out-standing example of institutional, andinternational, collaboration. The vol-ume will include papers from meetingsheld in Florence and Washington, andwill consider the history and preserva-tion of Orsanmichele as both oratoryand museum.

The evolution of Studies in the History of Art and of the separatelynumbered casva Symposium Papersseries within it reflects in many waysthe wider development of publishing atthe Gallery, and at casva in particular.During its first years, the Gallery didnot publish an independent annualreport. Instead, according to the statu-tory provisions of Congress, a shortaccount, printed by the GovernmentPrinting Office, was included in theannual report of the Smithsonian Insti-tution. Then, in 1966, in honor of theNational Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniver-

sary, the Trustees directed the Gallery to produce its own report with bothnarrative and statistical sections, giventhat the Gallery now had an educationprogram, and was “a center for art his-torical research and publication, for the training of young scholars, and even for the sponsorship of basic scientificresearch into the problems of conserva-tion.” As a result, in 1967, the firstReport and Studies in the History of Artappeared. Part One included a nowclassic article by then director JohnWalker on Ginevra de’ Benci, and othersby Kress Professors Jakob Rosenbergand René Huyghe, by three Samuel H.Kress fellows, and by Robert L. Feller,then senior fellow at the NationalGallery Research Project. John Walkerobserved that in the future some ofthese articles would be concerned withaspects of the collection, but otherswould reflect the independent researchof the community of scholars and con-servators at the Gallery. Thus was Stud-ies in the History of Art brought intobeing. Though the series went throughmany transformations, the philosophywas clear from the start: history andconservation were both important, and research should be independent as well as relevant to the collection.

The National Gallery of Art’s annualreport became a separate volume in1970, and several issues of Studiesappeared. With the opening of casvain 1979 things changed. Studies in theHistory of Art, volume 10, Macedoniaand Greece in Late Classical and EarlyHellenistic Times (1982), was also Sym-posium Papers i. This recorded casva’svery first symposium, held at the time of the exhibitionThe Search for Alexander. In his preface, then director J. Carter Brown announced three new

casvaCenter for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

Studies in the History of Art

categories of Studies: symposium papers(principally sponsored by casva),monographs, and collected essays. Themonograph series was inaugurated in1985 with the publication of four vol-umes dedicated to checklists of stainedglass in the United States. A secondmonograph series was launched as agroup of publications devoted to con-servation research, including studies ofBellini’s Feast of the Gods, and of earlymodern tapestries. Several volumespublished with the title ConservationResearch under the late Ross Merrill’sdirection were intended to parallel thecollected essay volumes of earlier years.

Most ambitious and coherent wasthe group of casva symposium volumesdedicated to Italian sculpture outlinedby Henry A. Millon, then dean of theCenter, in his preface to Italian Medals(1987), a volume also notable for itsinclusion of both technical and histori-cal material. Dean Millon announcedthe forthcoming publication of ItalianPlaquettes, and promised future symposia on gems and cameos, smallbronzes, and monumental bronzes. All of these took place, bringing inter-national scholars and experts to theGallery, and the symposium paperswere all published, thanks to dedicatedscholarly editors. The Samuel H. KressFoundation supported the meetings in recognition of their importance for research on our permanent collec-tion, and for the study of sculpture more generally.

The opening of the new sculpturegalleries in 2002 with the display of theRobert H. Smith collection inspired afurther symposium in 2003. CollectingSculpture in Early Modern Europe (2008)marked Robert Smith’s gift, the crown-ing glory of the Gallery’s treasured Renaissance bronze collection. Thoughweighing in at 512 pages, CollectingSculpture is not quite the largest volumein the symposium series: that honorgoes to Italian Panel Painting of theDuecento and Trecento (2002), the pub-lication of another joint research ven-ture, this time with the Istituto Univer-sitario Olandese in Florence. These

books have both become essential read-ing for the new scientific and historicalmaterial they contain.

Several earlier casva symposia,including Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1985),Cultural Differentiation and CulturalIdentity in the Visual Arts (1989) andRetaining the Original: Multiple Origi-nals, Copies and Reproduction (1989),were organized in collaboration withthe department of history of art at theJohns Hopkins University. In retrospectthese volumes reflect an important andvital response to the new art history,both comparative and global, andalready questioning the status of originality and authorship.

Studies in the History of Art grewout of an annual report to become acomplex publication program, present-ing for a while something of a biblio-graphical conundrum. The SymposiumPapers series has survived with a clearpurpose of giving permanence to theresearch presented at casva symposiaand making it available at a reasonablecost. Now produced by a team underthe leadership of Therese O’Malley,associate dean of the Center, with thesupport of the National Gallery’s pub-lishing office, and distributed by YaleUniversity Press, the series Studies inthe History of Art, Symposium Papers,meets the most exacting standards andreaches an increasingly wide audience.This heightened quality of productioncannot be taken for granted. A recentgrant from the Andrew W. MellonFoundation is helping us continue ourmission to disseminate new scholarshipon the visual arts, from fifteenth cen-tury woodcuts to Romare Bearden andthe early photographic album. The digi-tal library is a reality and offers manyadvantages that we continue to explore.But the illustrated book has proven an efficient and durable medium sincethe earliest days of print. • ElizabethCropper, Dean, Center for AdvancedStudy in the Visual Arts

N U M B E R 4 4 • S P R I N G 2 0 1 1

Front cover Studies in the History of Art,

vol. 71, edited by Ruth Fine and

Jacqueline Francis, 2011

Front cover Studies in the History of Art,

vol. 77, edited by Stephen Bann, 2011