Art History at Penn offers the student of the Early Modern world a chance to range widely in terms of regions, periods, media, and methods.
David Young Kim teaches and researches Southern Renaissance and Baroque art, with focus on the issues of cross-cultural exchange, geography, art literature, and historiography. He is also developing a secondary teaching and research field in the global art of the Lusophone world, with emphasis on early modern Brazil.
Shira Brisman specializes in the art and historiography of the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on print culture and its facilitation of the exchange of ideas, the creation of communities, and the development of pictorial languages that supplement or challenge the spoken and written word.
Students have ready access to additional Early Modern art historians owing to Penn’s consortium arrangement with several local universities: at Bryn Mawr (David Cast on Italy, Sylvia Houghteling on Global Baroque); Delaware (David Stone on Italian painting, Perry Chapman on Holland, Monica Dominguez-Torres on Spain and New Spain), and Princeton (Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann on Northern Renaissance, Carolina Mangone on sculpture, Carolyn Yerkes on architecture). Temple University also features noted scholars on Italian art and architecture, Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper, who are accessible to Penn students.
These academic strengths are abetted by remarkable facilities in the Philadelphia area, as well as strong links to museums and curators in both Washington and New York City. Both the Johnson Collection of paintings and the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art have been active collaborators on Early Modern projects and have hosted an annual intern from the Penn graduate program as the Zigrosser Fellow in Prints and Drawings. Additionally, several important print exhibitions have been staged on the Penn campus in the Ross Gallery of the Fine Arts Library and with the rare books division of the Penn Libraries.