Patricia Fortini Brown, previous chair of the Department of Art & Archaeology, has taught Italian Renaissance art at Princeton since 1983. She has a background in studio art, with an A.B. in political science and a Ph.D in art history. Venice, 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. A 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). Brown was part of a team responsible for planning an exhibition on the Italian domestic interior, "At Home in Renaissance Italy," held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006 and is working on two books on the artistic and cultural geography of the Venetian Empire in the Veneto and the Mediterranean. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Save Venice. Brown has taught Hellenic Studies sponsored courses on Venice and the Mediterranean with student trips to Crete and Corfu. Graduate students writing dissertations under her supervision have worked on a wide range of topics. While several have pursued themes relating Venetian art, others have written on civic art in Siena, the art and ritual of childbirth in Renaissance Florence, printmaking in early sixteenth-century Rome, the villa in sixteenth century Ragusa, Antonello da Messina, the sculpture of Filarete in Rome, and trade in antiquities between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.
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 (Yale University Press, 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: Fondazione Cassamarca e Angelo Colla editore, 2007, 309-337 (+ illustrations, 717-723); “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: Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini, Venice and Universität zu Köln, Germany, 2008), 155-174; and essays in The Renaissance Home: Art and Life in the Italian House, 1400-1600, ed. Marta Ajmar and Flora Dennis (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2006).
