Contact details:

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

+44 (0) 20 7848 2732

sheila.mctighe@courtauld.ac.uk

 

Sheila McTighe took her PhD at Yale University, specializing in French and Italian seventeenth-century art.  After teaching at Yale, Cornell and Columbia Universities in the U.S., she came to The Courtauld in 1998.

 

Research Interests


Four different strands of research inform her work.  Word and image studies first drew her into art history, when her undergraduate degree focused on French literature and poetics.  Issues in ‘making and meaning’, or the study of artistic practices in painting and printmaking, play a large role in both her writing and teaching.  Reception aesthetics and reception history have shaped her approach to the study of early modern art criticism.  And the relation of art history to social and cultural histories of early modern France and Italy—particularly the topic of microstoria--has increasingly become a focus within her current research.

Having initially specialized in early modern painting, she works now on prints and drawings as well.  Artists of particular interest to her are Caravaggio, Francesco Villamena, Annibale Carracci, Jacques Callot, Georges de La Tour, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.

 

Courses Taught in 2010-11

 

Recent/forthcoming publications:


Caravaggio, Orthodoxy and Dissent: The Role of Prints in his Artistic Practice, the Role of Print Culture in the Social World of His Patrons (2008)

The Imaginary Everyday: Genre Painting and Prints in Italy and France, circa 1580-1670 (New York and Pittsburgh: Periscope Press, 1st edition 2007, 2nd edition 2008).

‘The Old Woman as Art Critic: Speech and Silence in Response to the Passions, from Annibale Caracci to Denis Diderot’, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 71 (2008).

‘The End of Caravaggio,’ review essay, The Art Bulletin 88 (Sept. 2006) pp. 583-89.

'Food and the Body in Italian Genre Painting ca. 1580:Campi, Passarotti, and Carracci', The Art Bulletin 86 (June 2004) pp. 301-323.

'Abraham Bosse and the Language of Artisans: Genre and Perspective in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1648-1670', Oxford Art Journal 21 (1998) pp. 1-26.

Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

'Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Work: the Reception of Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna in 1646', Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993) pp. 75-91.


'Nicolas Poussin’s Storm Landscapes and 17th-Century Libertinage', Word and Image 5 (1989) pp. 333-361.


Forthcoming, in process:

‘Poussin’s Late Religious Paintings, Seicento Prints after Raphael, and the Passions of the Soul’


Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and the End of the Renaissance.