Penny Jolly

Professor of Art History, Emeritus

CONTACT INFORMATION

E-mail: pjolly@skidmore.edu

EDUCATION

• University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., History of Art, May 1976
• University of Pennsylvania, M.A., History of Art, December 1970
• Oberlin College, B.A., Art History, June 1969; graduated cum laude, "With High Honors in Art History," Phi Beta Kappa

Penny Howell Jolly’s scholarship focuses on late medieval and Renaissance European art of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.  She has published on artists such as Giotto, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Antonello da Messina, as well as holy figures, including Mary Magdalene, Adam and Eve, and Jerome.  Her current research interests include topics such as pregnancy, childbirth, and early modern domestic arts, as well as meanings of dress and hair. 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• “Gender, Dress, and Franciscan Tradition in the Mary Magdalene Chapel at San Francesco, Assisi,” Gesta 58, no. 1 (April 2019): 1-25.
• "Cultural Representations: Head and Body Hair in Medieval Art," in A Cultural History of Hair, ed. Roberta Milliken, 153-71.  London: Bloomsbury Publ., 2018.
• Picturing the “Pregnant” Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430-1550: Addressing and Undressing the Sinner-Saint. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2014.  
• “Pubics and Privates: Body Hair in Late Medieval Art,” in Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry Lindquist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 183-206.
• “The Wise and Foolish Magdalene, the Good Widow, and Rogier van der Weyden’s Braque Triptych,” Studies in Iconography 31 (2010): 98-156.
• “Rogier van der Weyden’s “Pregnant” Magdalene: On the Rhetoric of Dress in the Descent from the Cross,” Studies in Iconography 28 (2007), 1-72.
• Curated exhibition “Hair: Untangling a Social History,” on view at the Tang Teachin
• Hair: Untangling a Social History. With additional essays by Gerald Erchak, Amelia Rauser, Jeffrey O. Segrave, and Susan Walzer.  The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College: 2004.
• “Marked Difference: Earrings and ‘The Other’ in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Art,” in Encountering Medieval Dress and Textiles: Object, Text, and Image, ed. Désiré Koslin and Janet Snyder, NY: Palgrave, 2002, 195-207.
• “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Arras Altarpiece,” The Art Bulletin 82 (September 2000): 428-52.
• "Jan van Eyck's Italian Pilgrimage: A Miraculous Florentine Annunciation and the Ghent Altarpiece," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 61 (1998): 369-94.
• Made in God's Image?  Eve and Adam in the Genesis Mosaics at San Marco, Venice, Berkeley and London: The University of California Press, 1997.
• “More on the Ghent Altarpiece: Its Relationship to Philip the Good, Isabelle of Portugal, and the City of Ghent," Oud Holland, 101 (December 1987): 237-253.
• "Antonello da Messina's St. Jerome in His Study: an iconographical analysis," The Art Bulletin, LXV (1983): 238-253.
• "Rogier van der Weyden's Escorial and Philadelphia Crucifixions and their relation to Fra Angelico at San Marco," Oud Holland, 95 (September 1981): 113-126.