Gregory Waldrop
Phyllis G. Gordan/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year two of a two-year fellowship)
September 3, 2007–August 1, 2008
Profession
PhD Candidate, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley
Project title
Sight Unseen: Priests and Visual Representation in Early Quattrocento Siena
Project description
Ubiquitous, indispensable, sometimes notorious—priests are ever before the eyes of the faithful in Quattrocento, as central figures of both quotidian spectacle and the Church’s sacramental system. Visual representations of their priestly mediation have been largely overlooked by art historians. My dissertation examines priests as depicted subjects and calculated objects of art production and focuses on Sassetta’s Arte della Lana altarpiece (1425) as the site of a remarkable, and hitherto unremarked, display of sacerdotal visual rhetoric.