BROWN, Patricia Fortini 1936-

PERSONAL: Born November 16, 1936, in Oakland, CA; daughter of Jack Gino (a chemist) and Mary Lillian (an executive secretary; maiden name, Wells; present surname, Forester) Fortini; married Peter Claus Meyer, May 28, 1957 (divorced August 30, 1978); married Peter Robert Lamont Brown (a historian), August 16, 1980 (divorced July 5, 1989); children: (first marriage) Paul Wells, John Jeffrey. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Attended Brigham Young University, 1954-57; University of California at Berkeley, A.B., 1959, M.A., 1978, Ph.D., 1983. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES: Home—54 Humbert St., Princeton, NJ 08542-3319. Office—Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1018. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: State of California, Department of Employment, employment and claims specialist in San Francisco and San Rafael, 1960-65; painter and graphic designer in San Rafael, 1963-76; Mills College, Oakland, CA, lecturer in Italian Renaissance art, spring, 1983; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor, 1983-89, associate professor 1989-97, professor of art and archaeology, 1997—, department chair, 1999-2005; Andrew W. Mellon associate professor in art and archaeology, 1991-95; University of Cambridge, Slade Professor of Fine Arts, 2000; fellow commoner, St. Johns College, Cambridge. Fellow at American Academy in Rome, 1989-90; Guggenheim fellow, 1992-93. Member of San Rafael Cultural Affairs Commission, 1975-77; cocurator of Municipal Art Gallery, Falkirk Community Cultural Center, San Rafael, 1976-77. Member, board of advisors, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, 2004-07. Former studio artist and graphic designer, 1963-75. Consultant to documentaries; curator of exhibits; presenter at conferences.

MEMBER: College Art Association of America, Renaissance Society of America (member of advisory council; representative of the discipline of the visual arts, 1988-90; member, board of trustees, 1994-96; vice president, 1998-2000; president, 2000-02).

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright fellow in Italy, 1980-81; Social Science Research Council fellow, 1980-82; Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grant for Venice, 1982, 1998-99; second prize for Premio Salotto Veneto, 1989, for Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio; Rome Prize fellow, 1989-90; Guggenheim fellow, 1989-90; Phyliss Goodhart Gordon Book Prize, 1998, and Charles Rufus Morey Prize finalist, 1999, both for Venice and Antiquity; Folger Shakespeare Library Mellon postdoctoral research fellowship, 1998-99.

WRITINGS:

Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1988.

Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.

Art and Life in Renaissance Venice, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 1997, published as Art and Life in Renaissance Venice: A World Apart, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1997.

Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2004.

Also author of La pittura nell' eta di Carpaccio: i grandi cicli narrativi, 1992. Contributor to books, including Rome: Tradition, Innovation, and Renewal, edited by Clifford Brown, Chandler Kirwin, and John Osborne, [Florence, Italy], 1989; St. Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend, edited by Joseph C. Schoubert and Frederick Van Fleteren, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1999; Antiquity and Its Interpreters, edited by Ann Kuttner and others, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2000; Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797, edited by John Martin and Dennis Romano, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2000; Macmillan Encyclopedia of Art, and Enciclopedia Italiana, and to various art history journals.

SIDELIGHTS: After reading Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past, one of Patricia Fortini Brown's critically acclaimed art history books, "no one can revisit familiar scenes in Venice . . . without seeing new aspects to the Venetian performance," according to New York Times Book Review contributor Gary Wills. Brown analyzes thirteenth-through sixteenth-century Venetian "arts, crafts, and literature to explore . . . 'a Venetian view of time . . . history and . . . historical change,'" noted Mary Morgan Smith in Library Journal. "Of all the major medieval cities in Italy, only Venice lacked a classical past. It had no Roman foundations to unearth, build on or celebrate," explained Wills.

Venice & Antiquity presents "themes [that] may not seem either new or profound. But," the reviewer lauded, "she shows, in sensitive detail, how the perpetual reinvention of Venice made the City reinvent the Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem over against which it was defining itself. This led to a peculiarly shifting and illusionistic view of the past, undergoing subtle changes like the light of the city's own watery atmosphere." Although John Julius Norwich warned in Observer that "This book is not an easy read. There were moments when I felt that the author had got a little carried away by her own scholarship and allowed herself to become slightly ponderous," he overwhelmingly praised the work as a "superbly produced and beautifully illustrated book" with virtually no inaccuracies. Norwich maintained that Brown is "alarmingly well-informed" and "writes . . . with fluency and style." In his review, Norwich also positively notes Brown's remarkable first book, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio."

In her award-winning Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio "Brown shows how narratives of the lives of saints, miracles, and state processions all yield to the eyewitness style of Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio," described Thomas D'Evelyn in Christian Science Monitor. "Narrative has preoccupied art historians of the Renaissance ever since Vasari recounted his fascination with storytelling pictures in The Lives of the Artists, but the very ubiquity of narrative in Renaissance art seems to forestall critical reassessment," wrote a reviewer for Art Bulletin who declared Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio to be "a welcome focus on the study of visual narrative in Renaissance art history." Charles Hope praised the book in the New York Review of Books for "not just [dealing] very competently with the many specific problems raised by individual works, but also [looking] at more general issues, such as the stylistic origins of the genre." Her work, according to Times Literary Supplement contributor David Rosand, "offers a dynamic portrait of a society and its self-imaging." "She has assembled a mass of information, and she has characterized the preoccupations and values of the patrons with skill and sympathy," assessed Hope, qualifying: "But we still need to know much more, not about their piety or their attitudes to Venetian society as a whole, but about their responses to paintings."

Venice is again the focus of Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family, as Brown profiles the lives of both the city's wealthiest class as well as its successful merchant or cittadino class. The book examines the politics, culture, arts, and architecture of the period, as well as presenting an in-depth look at the lives of some of the most influential women of the day, both courtesans and nobility. Praising Private Lives as "that rare thing: a book that will instruct the scholar and delight the general reader,' Choice contributor D. Pincus cited the wealth of color illustrations included in the work and dubbed the volume "comprehensive social history at its best." "By focusing on architecture, Brown . . . goes to the heart of Venetian Renaissance culture," Bruce Boucher added in the New York Times Book Review, explaining that through her approach, the art historian "traces many paradoxical elements of public and private life back to the consumer society of the late 1500's, which pursued 'an abundance of necessary things.'" Opulence was indeed the order of the day in sixteenth-century Venice, as images of the era's palaces, clothing, textiles, and art will show. Boucher noted that, through her work, Brown "brings a lost chapter in Venetian history to life through an illuminating selection of images and instances." And, the critic concluded "the curious reader could not wish for a wiser guide."

Brown once told CA: "The central concern of my scholarly work has been the manner in which works of art can materialize and 'sum up' significant aspects of the culture in which they were produced. More specifically, I have sought to understand the formal and iconographical qualities of Renaissance art through a study of the perceptual skills, the ideological assumptions, and the social situation that engendered its production. This approach, exemplified by my book, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, has been strongly influenced by the particular background out of which I began my academic career.

"After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1959, I seriously pursued a career as a studio artist while raising a family. During this period I also became active in historical preservation activities, and in 1976 I began graduate work in the history of art after an interim of about seventeen years away from the academic world.

"While my late reentry into a graduate program presented a number of difficult hurdles—among them, regaining competency in foreign languages and learning how to think, research, and write as a historian—my studio background proved a positive asset. For during my graduate training I was encouraged to develop an interdisciplinary approach that combined my practical experience as a working artist with my earlier interests in history and political theory. The foundation for this approach had been laid in the studio. There I had been in the habit of confronting the work of art as a 'solution': as the end result of a process of problem solving. Thus, while I was learning in the course of my graduate studies to approach art in a consciously analytical, rather than a purely intuitive, manner, the formal analysis of paintings was already a familiar, embedded skill for me.

"Becoming a historian, however, was another matter. It meant a shift in viewpoint to a position opposite to that of the artist: that is, to the position of the original patrons and viewers of the art. Here my earlier interests in political theory and behavior, kept alive in a practical way by my community service, developed into a concern for the broader dynamics of art: its place in a larger social and cultural context of human experience. Essentially, then, I sought to balance in my work the competing claim of the historian and the artist. It is this combination that has challenged me to deal both with the aesthetic and formal elements of works of art and with the contextual concerns of social, political, religious, and cultural history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Art Bulletin, March, 1992, pp. 161-62.

Art History, December, 1988.

Choice, November, 1988, p. 474; January, 2005, D. Pincus, review of Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family, p. 840.

Christian Science Monitor, September 2, 1988, p. B2.

Library Journal, October 1, 1988, p. 82; February 15, 1997, p. 145.

New York Review of Books, December 22, 1988, p. 42.

New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1997, p. 34; December 4, 2004, Bruce Boucher, review of Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, p. 86.

Observer (London, England), February 23, 1997, p. 16.

Times Educational Supplement, October 26, 1990, p. R2.

Times Literary Supplement, October 21, 1988, p. 1178.