Renée Ater, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D. University of Maryland
American Art

Anthony Colantuono, Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University
Seventeenth-Century Italian, French, and Spanish Art

Meredith J. Gill, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. Princeton University
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art

June Hargrove, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture

Shannen Hill, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
African Art

Jason Kuo, Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Chinese Art

Steven A. Mansbach, Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University
Twentieth-Century Art

William L. Pressly, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art

Joshua A. Shannon, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Contemporary Art History & Theory

Yui Suzuki, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles
Japanese Art

Marjorie S. Venit, Professor and Chair and Scheduling Officer
Ph.D. New York University
Ancient Mediterranean Art History & Archaeology

Alicia Volk, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Yale University
Japanese Art

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University
Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art

Distinguished Affiliates

Franklin Kelly
Ph.D. University of Delaware
American Art

Richard Spear
Ph.D. Princeton University
Italian Baroque Art

Emeriti and Adjunct Faculty

Anthony Colantuono
Art in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Spain, and France

Office: 4229 Art-Sociology Building

Email: anthony.colantuono@yahoo.com

Telephone: (301) 405-1496

Anthony Colantuono is a specialist in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian, French and Spanish art, with particular emphasis on the study of early art-theoretical and art-critical writings, interpretative methodology and the interaction between the visual and literary arts. He has been the recipient of the 2-year Kress “Rome Prize” fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (1983-85), a Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Studies (for 2002-2003), and two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (summer 1990 and calendar year 2004).

Professor Colantuono's work in general deals with broad issues of pictorial-rhetorical technology, as well as problems in the functionality or “instrumentality” of works of art in well defined historical contexts. His book entitled Guido Reni's ‘Abduction of Helen': The Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997) has been described as the seminal study of the uses of art in seventeenth-century diplomacy and advances a broader theory of the political functionality of art in early modernity. The study also examines the rhetorical manipulation of the painting's fame for political or diplomatic purposes, specifically focusing upon the deliberate deployment of more than two dozen literary encomia in praise of Reni's Helen as an early modern form of “media spin.”

Professor Colantuono has published numerous essays encompassing interpretative, documentary and connoisseurial problems as well as theoretical and methodological issues. Recent essays have examined connections between literary stylistics and pictorial style in the works of Caravaggio and Lorenzo Lippi; natural philosophy and medical erudition in Bellini's and Titian's bacchanals for Alfonso I d'Este; Estense ducal art patronage at Ferrara; the theory of diplomatic imagery in seventeenth-century Europe; and various studies on the art and art-theoretical writings of Nicolas Poussin.