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

From its creation, the Center forAdvanced Study in the Visual Arts(casva) was envisioned as bringingtogether within the National Gallery of Art a community of scholars for the advancement of knowledge of art,architecture, urbanism, and film. Themost visible casva community is thegroup of visiting members brought tothe Center each year. Less evident is the community of researchers workingwithin casva on several long-term proj-ects. Directed by the dean and associatedeans of the Center, these projects havebeen designed to support innovativework that will also result in a resourcefor the wider field. The Center’s origi-nal A.W. Mellon grant made it possi-ble to establish small teams of researchassociates working together on a rotat-ing basis, and the last two years havewitnessed the culmination of severalambitious projects and the advance-ment of others.

Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530– 1900

One of these projects is the Guide toDocumentary Sources for Andean Studies,1530 – 1900, published in 2008 by theUniversity of Oklahoma Press in collab-oration with casva. This three-volumework was conceived and organized byJoanne Pillsbury, who served for fouryears as associate dean of the Centerand is now director of pre-Columbianstudies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washing-ton, dc. The Center has had a long-standing interest in Latin Americanstudies, especially in connection withthe exhibitions of Olmec, Moche, andMayan art at the Gallery, and this ref-

erence work — supported by the GettyGrant Program, the Andrew W. MellonFoundation, the British Academy, andthe Lampadia Foundation — makes rarehistorical sources accessible to scholarsin a field of growing interest andimportance.

Keywords in American Landscape Design

For more than a decade, casva associ-ate dean Therese O’Malley, widelyrespected for her research on the historyof the National Mall, has worked with ateam of associates and advisors to com-pile Keywords in American LandscapeDesign, a richly illustrated historical dic-tionary of the vocabulary of landscapedesign and garden planning used inNorth America from the seventeenth tothe mid-nineteenth century. Rangingfrom alcove and arbor to walk andwood, one hundred terms are definedthrough extensive documentation andimagery. The broad geographic scope of the texts reveals patterns of regionalusage — the piazza, for example, wasonce synonymous with the veranda orporch, but by the late nineteenth cen-tury this meaning survived only inLouisiana, while elsewhere the termcame to be associated with the publicsquare. The wide chronological range of the sources, including newspapers,diaries, treatises, letters, and muchephemera, shows how design practiceand landscape vocabulary in the UnitedStates changed over time. MountAuburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts, for instance, was the first

“rural cemetery,” a picturesquely land-scaped park that transformed the burialground into a public urban amenity.

O’Malley and her colleagues havealso catalogued thousands of images,with more than one thousand in thevolume. Some are well-known classics,such as the sketches made by BenjaminHenry Latrobe, architect of the Capitol,of the gardens and landscapes hedesigned and visited. Others, includingGeorge Washington’s own drawings for his plantation and greenhouses, are either rarely seen or completelyunknown.Keywords, published this yearby Yale University Press in associationwith casva, reveals that landscape his-tory is integral to cultural history, and itwill be of immense value for the studyof American landscape painting and of landscape itself from colonial times.

In addition to the Center’s owngrant from the Andrew W. MellonFoundation and Paul Mellon Endow-ment funds, support for this projectcame from the Getty Grant Program,the Graham Foundation for AdvancedStudies in the Fine Arts, and the Terra Foundation for the Arts.

The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635

Documentation of the history of theAccademia di San Luca, a Roman acad-emy established in the late sixteenthcentury and the model for future acad-emies, has been notoriously hamperedby the inaccessibility of the academy’sarchive. casva associate dean PeterLukehart, who has studied the educa-tion and professional organization ofartists in early modern Italy for manyyears, undertook a concentrated pro-gram of research in the Archivio diStato di Roma instead, hoping to recover

casvaCenter for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

Current Research at the Center

the early history of the Accademia byother means. Through tracking the various notaries who acted as legalagents for artists in the academy, hefound many documents not seen sincethey were signed and witnessed fourcenturies ago. Supported by the A. W.Mellon grant and the Center’s PaulMellon endowment, Lukehart designeda project that would bring interestedscholars together to create an onlinedatabase, in tandem with a publicationon the foundations of the Accademia.

Scholars gathered at the NationalGallery and in Rome for three intenseand productive meetings, which, withthe support of casva’s Robert H. SmithGrant, resulted in the second volume inthe Center’s Seminar Series. The Accade-mia Seminars: The Accademia di SanLuca in Rome, c. 1590 – 1635 appeared in paperback in 2009. Like The Dada Seminars, the first in the series, this second volume of essays attests to thevalue of the sort of extended collabora-tion and debate that casva can provide.The result is an accessible referencework that provides material for fur-ther research and teaching in anaffordable format.

The second part of the project is a Web site, launched this year. “TheHistory of the Accademia di San Luca,c. 1590– 1635: Documents from theArchivio di Stato di Roma” bringstogether transcriptions and digitalimages of some four hundred notarialdocuments from the early decades ofthe Accademia in a searchable and publicly accessible reference database(www.nga.gov/casva/accademia). Alsoincluded are images of works by mem-bers of the Accademia now in the col-lections of the National Gallery of Art,together with selected bibliographies.Such links to the Gallery’s collectionand library databases mean that theWeb site will attract new visitors, both virtual and real.

Malvasia’s “Felsina Pittrice”

The title “Father of Art History” isoften awarded to Giorgio Vasari, whoseLives of the Artists remains the mostpopular account of Renaissance artists.Vasari’s Tuscan-based approach was,however, quickly criticized, especially by writers from other regions. Amongthe most vehement of these was CountCarlo Cesare Malvasia, whose FelsinaPittrice, published in Bologna in 1678,undertook to rewrite the history of theRenaissance and to record the work of such contemporary artists as GuidoReni and Guercino. This work hasnever been translated into English in itsentirety, and there is no modern Italianedition. casva dean Elizabeth Cropper,who has long been interested in earlyart criticism, has embarked on a projectwith an international team of colleaguesto translate, annotate, and edit Malva-sia’s text, together with his rough notes,as a series of monographs. The first volume, to be completed this year, willbe devoted to the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries, drawing attention tosuch Bolognese artists as Simone deiCrocefissi, whose Madonna and Childwith Angels and Giovanni da Piacenza,c. 1378, demonstrates all the liveliness of works by Florentine and Sienese con-temporaries. Robert H. Smith providedsupport for research and editorial workjust last year, and the Center is deter-mined to fulfill his wish to see the proj-ect move forward. • Elizabeth Cropper,Dean, Center for Advanced Study in theVisual Arts

N U M B E R 4 2 • S P R I N G 2 0 1 0

Thomas Chambers, Mount Auburn Cemetery, mid 19th

century, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Gift of

Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch

Pietro Francesco Alberti, A Painter’s Academy (detail),

c. 1625, etching, Research Library, The Getty Research

Institute, Los Angeles

Simone dei Crocefissi, Madonna and Child

with Angels and Giovanni da Piacenza,

c. 1378, oil on panel, Pinacoteca Nazionale

di Bologna, Bologna

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