Barbara Wisch, Professor of Art History, Renaissance, Baroque, and Roman Art (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley)

email: wischb@cortland.edu

Barbara Wisch joined the Cortland faculty in 1993. She received her Ph.D. (1985) and M.A. (1975) in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her specialty is the Italian Renaissance, which she approaches—in both her teaching and scholarship—from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Whether the first half of the survey of western art, Northern Renaissance art, Baroque art, or undergraduate seminars (such as "All Roads Lead to Rome (& Hollywood),” “Talking of Michelangelo,” and “Art, Gender, and Society: Designing Women "), students study works of art as unique visual expressions within larger historical and cultural contexts. These include religion, politics, economics, social systems, aesthetics, scientific theory, and technology. Innovations in style are examined as responses to complex traditions, in which patronage, function, iconography, and setting all play key roles in determining the work's appearance.

Professor Wisch has also curated exhibitions to ensure that students experience real works of art beyond the classroom. Her most recent exhibition, for which she also wrote the catalog, is A Passion for Porcelain: The Crocker Collection of Decorative Arts, on display at the Dowd Fine Arts Gallery from September 12 through October 21, 2006. The collection consists of European porcelain, 19th-century earthenware, antique silver, Art Deco jewelry, and American furniture. A multidisciplinary lecture series and a concert of 18th-century music from Dresden and Leipzig complement the exhibition. To celebrate the year 2000, she conceived and curated Siting the Millennium: Visions and Revisions, also at the Dowd Fine Arts Gallery. The exhibition examined some of the historical roots of millenarianism through a contextual study of illustrated texts, including the famous series of fifteen woodcuts of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer (1498), published in anticipation of the predicted end of the world in 1500. Other rooms of the gallery displayed images and maps of the two great pilgrimage sites of the western tradition, Jerusalem and Rome. The exhibition emphasized continuities of vision as well as revisions of apocalyptic prognostications and sacred urban topographies. Northern Renaissance Prints was the focus of another exhibition curated by Wisch in 1995. In 1987, she organized and wrote the catalog for Italian Renaissance Art: Selections from the Piero Corsini Gallery, an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Art at Penn State, then traveled to the College of William and Mary, the Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Art, and Marquette University.

Her commitment to undergraduate teaching as well as to scholarship has been recognized in a number of awards. Wisch, the senior scholar nominee from SUNY Cortland, was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 2006. Her research focused on the ritual celebrations in Renaissance Rome of the Early Christian virgin martyr Lucy, patron saint of eyesight. In May 2005, she received a SUNY Cortland Outstanding Achievement in Research Award. In 2002, Wisch was a fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut), the renowned German art historical institute in Rome, Italy. She was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society (1999). In 1998, she received the prestigious SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. The two-volume "All the world's a stage..." Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, Papers in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University, 6 (1990), co-edited by Wisch, was named a finalist for the 1991 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, co-sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research and the University of Illinois-Urbana. Wisch has also received numerous internal grants to support her research and publications.

Professor Wisch’s scholarly work focuses on the visual culture of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially the patronage of confraternities—religious organizations that encouraged devotion and charity among the laity, but also actively commissioned permanent and ephemeral works of art and theater. She is currently working on a book titled Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome. Together with Nerida Newbigin, professor of Italian Studies at the University of Sydney and an internationally recognized scholar on sacred and secular spectacle, they examine the intersecting activities of a complex organization, its finances, its patronage of art, architecture, drama, and ritual. They explore the dynamics of lay religious life and devotion in Rome, at the institutional heart of Christianity. Acting on Faith will be the first integrative, interdisciplinary book devoted to a lay religious brotherhood in Renaissance Italy. In Spring 2007, Wisch will join Newbigin at the University of Sydney as a Visiting Scholar in the School of Languages and Cultures to complete their collaborative research and writing project. This research has led Wisch to explore related facets of Renaissance art—from antisemitism in the visual culture to the role of miracle-working images to the new “information age” of printed maps of Rome and transformations in sacred topography.

Recent publications:

• “Incorporating Images: Some Themes and Tasks for Confraternity Studies and Early Modern Visual Culture,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Christopher F. Black and Pamela Gravestock eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 243–63.
  
  
• “Keys to Success: Propriety and Promotion of Miraculous Images by Roman Confraternities,” in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf eds. (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004), 161–85.
  
  
• “Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” Artibus et historiae 48 (2003): 143–72.
  
  
• “Re-viewing the Image of Confraternities in Renaissance Visual Culture,” in Confraternitas. Society for Confraternity Studies 14.2 (2003): 13–21.
  
  
• “Lord & Tailor: Fashioning Images of Jews in Renaissance Italy,” Notes from Zamir. The Magazine of the Zamir Chorale of Boston (Spring 2003): 10–11.
  
  
• “Memorie di teatro o rappresentazioni teatrali? Le rappresentazioni del Gonfalone nel Cinquecento e le scene ‘teatrali’ del loro Oratorio,” in L’Oratorio del Gonfalone a Roma: Il ciclo cinquecentesco della Passione di Cristo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2002), 49–57.
  
  
• ____ and Diane Cole Ahl eds. Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaisance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  
  
• “New Themes for New Rituals: The Crucifixion Altarpiece by Roviale Spagnuolo for the Oratory of the Gonfalone in Rome,” in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy, 203–34.

Wisch has also contributed articles and book reviews to international journals and books of collected essays. In addition to her own edited volumes, Professor Wisch has published in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities (1991); An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque, Sojourns In and Out of Italy. Studies in Architectural History Presented to Hellmut Hager (1992); and Confraternite, chiesa e società, Aspetti e problemi dell'associazionismo laicale europeo in età moderno e contemporanea (1994).