Dr. Sarah Blake McHam is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University specializing in Italian Renaissance art. Her articles have focused on Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting, sculpture, and manuscripts, and dealt with artists like Donatello, Giovanni Bellini, Tullio Lombardo, Titian, and Giambologna. Her interests center on patronage and the political and religious contexts in which works of art were produced. Her books include The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo in Padua and Venetian Renaissance Sculpture and Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, both published by Cambridge University Press. She is involved in the exhibition, “An Antiquity of Imagination: Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture,” to be held at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., in summer 2009. She is also interested in the effects of Greco-Roman literature and art in the Renaissance and has recently completed a book about the Roman Pliny the Elder’s influence on art and theory entitled Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History.

http://arthistory.rutgers.edu/faculty/bios/mcham

Areas of Expertise: Italian 13th- 16th-century painting and sculpture; classical heritage in the Italian Renaissance