Acknowledgments

Hall, Marcia B.

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Acknowledgments

Marcia B. Hall

After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century

This book was researched, written, and edited in Rome, all at the library of the American Academy in Rome. Little did they know, nor did I, when I timidly requested a desk in September 1994, that I would occupy it for three years. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for granting me a Fellowship for University Professors in...

Author

Marcia B. Hall

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-100106

Acknowledgments

This book was researched, written, and edited in Rome, all at the library of the American Academy in Rome. Little did they know, nor did I, when I timidly requested a desk in September 1994, that I would occupy it for three years. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for granting me a Fellowship for University Professors in 1995–96 that, together with a Study Leave from Temple University, enabled me to do the writing. The opportunity to be in Rome was afforded by a teaching assignment on Temple’s Rome campus, where my teaching dovetailed nicely with what I was researching. The students there in my High Renaissance class in the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997 used the manuscript as their text. Their responses and questions helped me clarify and hone it. Graduate students at Temple, Philadelphia, in the fall of 1997, pursued issues raised by the text, in some cases very fruitfully. Ian Verstegen pioneered further thrusts in the study of Barocci’s color, and Nicole Leighton’s research on Mantegna as a precursor of the relieflike style impelled me to make additions to the text at the copy-editing stage.

There are many friends and colleagues to whom I am indebted either for reading part or all of the draft or for other kinds of help and advice. First among them is Craig Smyth, whose perspicacity and generosity are a model without peer. Others include Paul Barolsky, Janis Bell, Phyllis Bober, Pia Candidas, Maria Ann Conelli, Tracy Cooper, Jan Gadyne, Nicholas Horsfall, John Paoletti, Loren Partridge, Dana Prescott, Maureen Pelta, Ingrid Rowland, Salvatore Settis, Paul Tegmeyer, Franca Trinchieri Camiz, Jack Wasserman, and Mark Weil. I thank colleagues at Temple, Rome, Maria Ponce de Leon and Jan Gadyne, for help with translation. Diane Sarachman acted as my underpaid research assistant in the early stages with her characteristic energy and perfectionism.

Locating and acquiring the photographs took nearly a year. Were it not for grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association, and Temple University, it would have been impossible to illustrate the book as it is. I had help in the arduous task of obtaining photographs from many friends: Sarah Boyd, Denise Bratton, Lucy Clink, Susan Langworthy, Tom Mueller, Sylvia Ferino Pagden, John Shearman, Gyde Shepherd, Fiorella Superbia, Simonetta Serra, Bette Talvacchia, and Mary Vaccaro.

My now long-standing relationship with my editor at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl, has sustained me throughout this project. I am grateful for her unique combination of intellect, efficiency, and practical good sense. Her assistant, Stephen Grimm, has helped unfailingly with good will and skill. Nicole Leighton volunteered to do the index, drawing upon her knowledge of the field and her familiarity with this text.

I wish to thank Christine Huemer and the staff of the American Academy in Rome for their courtesy and hospitality. Temple University in Rome was my communication center during this project, and the staff there bore the brunt of the endless printing, faxing, and phoning that was necessary. I wish to thank them, especially Dean Kim Strommen and Teri Moretti, for their always gracious help.

I have a special debt to Hellmut Wohl, who stimulated my interest in the antiquarians like Jacopo Ripanda in several lectures given in the early 1990s. I read his forthcoming book, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art, in draft and profited from it.

I thought of Sydney Freedberg as I wrote nearly every page. I have shamelessly repeated his language when I could find no satisfactory substitute. Although his books have proved difficult for those who were not his students and who cannot hear his voice intoning the words in their heads, they remain at the pinnacle of insightful and sensitive response to Renaissance style. It has been my hope that this work, so dependent from his, will help to keep his contribution alive.

Finally, I thank Gerald Hoepfner, my husband, who would be embarrassed if I revealed here the nature and extent of his contribution, so it will remain our secret.

M.B.H.
Philadelphia
March 1998

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