Patricia Fortini Brown, FAAR'90, RAAR'01, will be joined by AAR Trustee Mary Frank, co-editor of Reflections on Renaissance Venice: A Celebration of Patricia Fortini Brown (Five Continents, Milan, 2013) and other contributors in an illustrated conversation about how the book reflects Brown’s scholarship and career, including her time at the Academy. Frederick Ilchman and Sarah McHam, contributors to the volume, will join the conversation, which will be moderated by Diane Cole Ahl, RAAR'13.

Brown spent her academic career at the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, retiring in 2010. She is the author of three landmark volumes: Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1988), Venice and Antiquity (1996) and Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (2004). During Brown’s time at the Academy she focused on what would become Venice and Antiquity. As any Venetianist who spends time in Rome will attest, the ancient city highlights the otherness of Venice. Brown seized on that characteristic, sometimes described as venezianità, to explore Venice’s unique sensitivity to the passage of time and how it is manifest in the city’s art and architecture. Her experience in Rome colored the way she saw Venice, experienced venezianità, and approached it in her scholarship. For Brown, it was her return to Venice that constituted going home from Rome.

Mary E. Frank, an independent scholar, worked with Brown as her dissertation advisor at Princeton. In addition to being a trustee of the Academy, Frank is also on the Board of Directors of Save Venice and the Advisory Board of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

Frederick Ilchman did his undergraduate work at Princeton with Brown. He is the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Assistant Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Ilchman is also on the Board of Save Venice.

Sarah Blake McHam is a Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her most recent publication is Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2013).

Diane Cole Ahl, RAAR'13, is the Rothkopf Professor of Art History at Lafayette College. She is the author of Fra Angelico (Phaidon Press, 2008) and Benozzo Gozzoli (Yale University Press, 1996).

The Home from Rome series is made possible by the New Initiatives for Don Fund, a gift of Maria R. Cox.