Patricia Fortini Brown, formerly chair of the Department of Art & Archaeology (1999-2005), taught Italian Renaissance art at Princeton since 1983 and retired in 2010. Venice and its empire, from the late middle ages through the early modern period, has been the primary site of her scholarly research, with a focus on how works of art and architecture can materialize and sum up significant aspects of the culture in which they were produced. The recipient of a number of fellowships including a Fulbright grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, and several Delmas grants for research in Venice, Brown was also president of the Renaissance Society of America (2000-2), Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge (2001) and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2004-7). A corresponding fellow of the Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (2010), she was awarded the Serena Medal in Italian Studies (2011), a prize awarded annually by the British Academy, for “eminent services towards the furtherance of the study of Italian history, literature, art and economics.” Brown has taught courses sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies on Venice and the Mediterranean with student trips to Crete, Corfu, and Rhodes. She is working on two books on the artistic and cultural geography of the Venetian Empire in the Veneto and the Mediterranean. Graduate students writing dissertations under her supervision have worked on a wide range of topics. While some have pursued themes relating to Venetian art (ranging from patronage to painting to portraiture), others have written on art and architecture in Siena, Florence, Rome, and Ragusa, as well as on the trade in antiquities between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean and post-Byzantine art in Venetian and Ottoman territories. Brown currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Save Venice.

PUBLICATIONS: Brown's books include Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1988); Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (1996); Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (1997); and Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (2004). Recent articles include “Le antichità,” in Commercio e cultura mercantile, ed. F. Franceschi, R.A. Goldthwaite and R.C. Mueller, vol. IV of Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa (Treviso, 2007), 309-337; “Veronese’s Patrons,” in Paolo Veronese and San Sebastiano, supplement in Save Venice (2008), 78-83; “The Exemplary Life of Giulia Bembo Della Torre,” in Philanagnostes:. Studi in onore di Marino Zorzi, ed. Chryssa Maltezou and Peter Schreiner (Bari, 2008), 155-174; “Where the Money Flows: Art Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, ed. Frederick Ilchman (Boston, 2009), 41-59; “Là où l’argent coule à flots. Le mécénat dans la Venise du XVIe siècle, « in Titien, Tintoret, Véronèse . . . Rivalités à Venise, ed. Vincent Delieuvin and Jean Habert (Paris, 2009), 102-29 ; “Seduction and Spirituality: the Ambiguous Roles of Music in Venetian Art,” in The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy: Sound, Space and Object, ed. Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti (Oxford, in press), 19-36 (in press); and “Pietro Bembo e l’arte di diplomazia,” in Pietro Bembo e le Arti, ed. Guido Beltramini (Vicenza, in press).