Marilyn Aronberg Lavin

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is a senior scholar, well known in her field as a pioneer in the use of computers for the history of art. Her 1990 book The Place of Narrative: Mural Painting in Italian Churches, 431-1600 AD showed the way database analysis can uncover new ideas and new facts when applied to a history of artistic monuments over a long period of time. She initiated (in 1989) one of the first collaborative projects between a humanist scholar and graphic specialists, computer technicians, and database experts in which the result was an intellectually focused mass of material that challenges traditional methodologies of teaching and research. Know as the "Piero Project," the electronic compendium of images and text gives evidence not only of the viability of such harmonious collaborations, but also is a testimony to the necessity of reorienting concepts of creativity in the humanities and in electronic technology.

Lavin's major area of concentration is painting and sculpture in the Italian Early Renaissance. A life-time of scholarship has focused on the career of the painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca (1412-1492); a detail from his painting The Flagellation of Christ is pictured above. Her publications include:

• Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation, (London/New York; 1972; Tokyo [in Japanese], 1980; paperback, Chicago, 1990)
• Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, (New York, 1975), Recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association of America for Distinguished Scholarship
• Piero della Francesca's "Baptism of Christ", (New Haven, 1981)
• The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University,1883-1923 (Centennial Publication), Princeton University, 1983)
• The Place of Narrative:(First place winner in the Chicago Women in Publishing award competition, 1991); paper (1994)
• IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on his Sixtieth Birthday, editor, (Italica Press, NY, 1990)
• Piero della Francesca, (New York, 1992; Harry N. Abrams Masters of Art Series)
• Monarca della Pittura: Piero and his Legacy, Papers of a Colloquium held at National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1992), Editor and contributor, (Washington, D.C. 1995)
• Piero della Francesca: San Francesco, Arezzo, (New York, 1994, Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance, George Braziller Publisher; Italian edition, 1996)
• The Liturgy of Love: Images from the Song of Songs in the Art of Cimabue, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. Lawrence, KA, 2001 , with Irving Lavin; and in Italian,  Modena: Panini, 1999)
• Piero della Francesca. (London: Phaidon Press, 2002)

In 1976, Lavin gave a series of lectures for the Christian Gauss Seminar at Princeton University, where she taught part time from 1977 to 1995,  in the Department of Art and Archaeology. She has been visiting Professor at Yale University, the University of Maryland, the Istituto per gli Studi Filosofici (Naples), and the University of Rome (La Sapienza). She and her husband, Irving Lavin (Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study) have spent every summer for the past 40 years doing research in the libraries and archives of Italy. Her older daughter Amelia is a photographic/fabric artist in Baltimore, Md. Her younger daughter Sylvia is Chair of the Department of Architecture at UCLA.

She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association of America and was founding Chair of the Committee on Electronic Information of the same organization. She has been on the Advisory Committee of the J. Paul Getty Art History Information Program, recently renamed the Getty Institute of Information, since the mid-1980's. In 1991, she founded and became moderator of the listserv CAAH (Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians) bringing together electronically more than one thousand scholars from twenty-two countries around the world. (CAAH@Princeton.Edu)