This Round Table brings together a group of world-leading scholars on Parmigianino to discuss their latest projects and research on the artist, one of the most celebrated of sixteenth-century Italy. During an afternoon academics and curators from Italy, UK and the US will present on the artist’s manifold artistic practices, including drawing, printmaking and painting, substantially updating our knowledge on this important artist and producing a state-of-the-art assessment of scholarship on his oeuvre.
This Round Table, which will include Q&A after each paper, coincides with the Drawings Gallery exhibition The Art of Experiment: Parmigianino at The Courtauld, a collaborative project between the Gallery, the Institute and the Conservation department at The Courtauld, which has brought together former MA and research students, curators, conservators and a member of faculty, and is thus integral part of the Courtauld Connects’ raison d’être. Feedback by the distinguished speakers to the exhibition and catalogue will offer the participants in The Courtauld’s project the opportunity to discuss their work with some of the most renowned scholars in the field.
Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Dr Guido Rebecchini (The Courtauld)
Participants
David Ekserdjian is Professor of the History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester. As well as writing and lecturing widely on Renaissance art, with particular specialities in the artists Correggio and Parmigianino, Professor Ekserdjian is also an expert on the history of collecting. He acts as an adviser to international museums and galleries, including the National Gallery and Tate Britain, as well as to private collectors and auction houses. Bronze sculpture is another of Professor Ekserdjian’s areas of expertise and it formed the topic of an exhibition that he conceived and curated at the Royal Academy in 2012.
Achim Gnann is Senior Lecturer and Curator of Italian art from the 15th to the 19th Century at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Author of several books and exhibition catalogues on Renaissance artists (including Raphael: The Drawings, 2017, an exhibition organised in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), and of the catalogue raisonné of Parmigianino’s drawings (2007). His most recent book on Rembrandt’s landscape drawings was published in 2021.
Catherine Jenkins is an independent art historian and former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her publications include Prints at the Court of Fontainebleau, c. 1542-47 (3 vols.) and numerous articles on sixteenth-century printmaking. She was the co-curator of the recent Metropolitan Museum exhibition The Renaissance of Etching.
Aimee Ng is Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. A specialist in Italian Renaissance art, she has organized exhibitions on Bertoldo di Giovanni; Giovanni Battista Moroni; European portrait medals from the fifteenth to nineteenth century; Andrea del Sarto; and Parmigianino. She has held curatorial and academic positions at The Morgan Library & Museum, where she was postdoctoral fellow at the Morgan’s Drawing Institute in 2014, and at Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D.
Naoko Takahatake is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Getty Research Institute. Prior to joining the GRI in 2019, she was Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Takahatake has curated and co-curated exhibitions of works on paper from the Renaissance to the present. A specialist in 16th- and 17th-century Italian print history, she organized the 2018 exhibition The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy and edited the accompanying catalogue.
Mary Vaccaro is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas, Arlington, who specializes in sixteenth-century northern Italian painting and drawing. In 2002 she published a monographic book on the paintings of Parmigianino after co-authoring a volume on the same artist’s drawings (2000). As an authority on the School of Parma, she has published widely on the art of Parmigianino. In 2014-15, she held a senior research appointment as Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Italy, which allowed her to deepen her understanding of 16th- and 17th-century Bolognese draftsmen, especially the Carracci.
