"I went to Rome having worked for several years in New York on an art history dissertation and a museum collection catalogue in tandem. It was doubly my good fortune to move for nearly a year to the American Academy in Rome and then return again to New York and museum work in an expanded role. In the six months since, I have begun to discover the ramifications of ‘The Rome Year’ on my area of scholarship—the history of European sculpture in the fertile years of the 15th and 16th centuries—and, just as importantly, on my vocation—presenting and interpreting art of the past." Peter J. Bell, FAAR’13

Peter Jonathan Bell is Assistant Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and holds degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Oberlin College. He has lectured in North America and Europe and published on Renaissance and Baroque sculpture and printmaking. He has won grants and fellowships from the Courtauld, NYU, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Met, and was the Robert Lehman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize winner 2012-2013.

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