"Bernini's Terracotta Sketches and the Fire of Art," lecture by Steven Ostrow, visiting speaker in Art History

Tuesday, October 23, at 5:30 pm, in 116 Art Building West (map)

Steven F. Ostrow (Ph.D., Princeton, 1987) specializes in early-modern Italian (especially Roman) visual culture, with an emphasis on the post-Tridentine period and seventeenth-century sculpture. He has published on a diverse range of subjects, from late-sixteenth-century tomb sculpture to early-eighteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, engaging issues concerned with patronage, iconography, and historicism; art theory and artistic practices; the interplay among art, politics, science, and religion; and the literary construction of artists' biographies. His current research focuses on the art theory and biography of Gianlorenzo Bernini, Spanish Golden Age painting, and Pietro Tacca's Quattro Mori. After teaching at Vassar College and the University of California, Riverside, in 2006 he assumed the chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. He is the recipient of the Accademia dei Lincei Fellowship. The Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art (ROME PRIZE) at the American Academy in Rome, and the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California, Riverside.