David M. Stone, professor of art history at the University of Delaware, specializes in Italian Baroque art and is a leading authority on Caravaggio and Guercino. As the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Art History in 1997–98, Stone studied Caravaggio, focusing in particular on the artist’s fifteen-month sojourn in Malta. His research supported publication of Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood, and Malta (2006), as well as articles in Paragone and the Art Bulletin. He also participated in the acclaimed exhibition Caravaggio: The Final Years, organized by the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and the National Gallery in London, in 2004–5. His scholarship on the Bolognese artist Guercino includes Guercino, Master Draftsman: Works from North American Collections, an exhibition he organized in 1991 that traveled to the Harvard University Art Museums, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Guercino: Catalogo completo dei dipinti (1991), a complete catalogue of the artist’s paintings. More recently, Stone contributed entries on Guercino to the exhibition catalogues Il Cavalier Calabrese: Mattia Preti, tra Caravaggio e Luca Giordano (2013), and Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum (2014). In 2015, he was the recipient of a grant from the Kajima Foundation for the Arts, which supported a two-week trip to Japan, where he gave a lecture on Guercino at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo and a lecture on Caravaggio at the University of Kobe.

A trustee of the American Academy in Rome and a member of the AAR Advisory Council to the Committee of the School of Classical Studies, Stone returned to Rome this spring as the James S. Ackerman Scholar in Residence. He discussed Guercino’s creative process and his pricing of paintings with the Baroque scholar Patrizia Cavazzini as part of the Academy’s Conversations | Conversazioni series.