Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. 1926- (Samuel Y. Edgerton, Samuel Youngs Edgerton, Jr.)

PERSONAL:

Born September 30, 1926, in Cleveland, OH; son of Samuel Youngs and Mary Edgerton; married Dorothy W. Dugan, 1951; children: Perky, Samuel Youngs III, Mary. Education: University of Pennsylvania, A.B., 1950, M.F.A., 1956, M.A., 1960, Ph.D., 1965.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Williamstown, MA. Office—Department of Art, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Boston University, Boston, MA, professor of art history and department chair, 1964-80; Williams College, Williamstown, MA, Amos Lawrence professor of art history and director of graduate program, 1980-93. Fulbright exchange teacher to Germany, 1957-58; member of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, 1967-68 and 1987.

MEMBER:

College Art Association, Renaissance Society of America, Pre-Columbian Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Endowment for Humanities grants, 1967 and 1970-71; Villa I Tatti fellow, 1971-72; American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 1977 and 1986-87; Guggenheim fellow, 1977-78. Abbot Lowell Cummings Prize, Vernacular Architectural Forum, 2003, for Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico.

WRITINGS:

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1975.

Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1985.

The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1991.

(As Samuel Y. Edgerton) Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, with photographs by Jorge Pérez de Lara, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2001.

Contributor of articles to professional journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., is the author of several works about art history. In The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution, Edgerton collects eight essays "that deal with the connections between art and science during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance," observed Jane Andrews Aiken in Technology Review. Aiken noted that the author "concerns himself mainly with the revolutions taking place from about 1300 to 1600 in the way people perceived and represented the world around them," as artists and engineers "developed strategies for representing solid form shaped by light and shade and located in a defined space." According to Aiken, "This in turn set the stage for the kind of literal, unambiguous visual communication appropriate to scientific inquiry—notably in the physical sciences, because of their dependence on careful analysis of forms."

In Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, Edgerton "examines how Spanish friars and their indigenous students forged a new style of religious art and architecture in sixteenth-century Mexico," wrote Historian contributor R. Douglas Cope. In the words of Latin American Antiquity reviewer Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, "Edgerton argues that colonial Mexican Indians did not merely create second-rate imitations of European art, but became masters in the painting, sculpting, and masonry techniques necessary to create their own ‘Indian Renaissance’ as early as 1550." The author "does the best job so far of drawing together the ecclesiastical campaign of building in sixteenth-century central and southern Mexico with that of seventeenth-century New Mexico," remarked Barry D. Sell in the Canadian Journal of History. "He also shows a commendable resistance to current trends to devalue either the indigenous or intrusive influences on the church complexes he describes…. In short, this is a work that shows a deft touch, communicating to the reader a wealth of information as well as the excitement the writer feels for his subject."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Canadian Journal of History, August, 2003, Barry D. Sell, review of Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico, p. 358.

Historian, spring, 2004, R. Douglas Cope, review of Theaters of Conversion, p. 138.

Latin American Antiquity, June, 2003, Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria, review of Theaters of Conversion, p. 238.

Technology Review, October, 1992, Jane Andrews Aiken, review of The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution, p. 77.