Art historian to discuss "Waterworks Inside St. Peter's"

“Waterworks Inside St. Peter’s: Decorations for the Beatification of St. Teresa of Avila in 17^th-Century Rome” is the topic of UMass scholar Pamela Jones, who will lecture Friday, Nov. 22, at Skidmore.

An internationally known scholar and professor in the Department of Art History at UMass, Boston, Jones will lecture at 5:30 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. Skidmore’s departments of History and Foreign Languages and Literatures are sponsoring the talk.

Jones is a specialist in Italian art of the late 16th and 17th centuries, with particular interests in art and religious culture, the reception of art, patronage and collecting, and art theory and criticism. She has received grants from such organizations as the Kress Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the author of the book Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (Cambridge University Press, 1993; Italian translation by Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1997), and co-edited the volume From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550-1650 with Thomas Worcester (E.J. Brill, 2002). Jones has also co-curated two exhibitions that examined old master paintings in their original stylistic, religious, and social contexts:  Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1999) and Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500 to 1800 (Worcester Art Museum, 2005). Her book Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni, was published by Ashgate in 2008. Her latest book, an edited edition of two 17th-century art treatises by Federico Borromeo, was published in 2010 in Harvard University Press’s series The I Tatti Renaissance Library. The book’s title is Federico Borromeo ‘Sacred Painting’ ‘Museum’;  Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr. translated the treatises from Latin to English and Jones wrote the introduction and notes. Jones is currently working on art and the cult of St. Teresa of Avila in Rome during the 17th century.

In 1995, Jones was inducted into the Accademia di S. Carlo in Milan. She recently served on the program committee and Gordon Prize Committee of the Renaissance Society of America, and is currently field editor for Early Modern and Southern European Art for CAA Reviews, a publication of the College Art Association.

Jones is also a Skidmore parent. Her daughter, Rosalind Rothwell ’14, will graduate in May as a history major with minors in art history and Italian. Two summers ago, she and Madison Lehrhaupt ’14 completed a summer internship at the Saratoga National Historical Park. They researched how newspapers published in New York and New England portrayed the 1777 campaign by the British to control the strategically important Hudson Valley. That campaign led to the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga.