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Home > Faculty > Full-time Faculty > Sarah Blake McHam Professor Italian Renaissance Art Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts New York University Biographical Information: Professor McHam is a specialist in Italian painting and sculpture between 1200 and 1600.  Her recent publications include Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback edition, 2000), a volume of essays that employ different critical methodologies to analyze sculpture, and “Donatello’s Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence,” The Art Bulletin, 83 (March 2001), 32-47.  She is currently revising for publication Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History, a book about the influence of Pliny the Elder on Italian Renaissance art and aesthetics. She also recently completed articles on Giambologna's "Equestrian Monument to Cosimo I.", Giovanni Bellini’s painting called “Woman with a Mirror,” and a reassessment of Padua’s role in the dissemination of Renaissance style throughout the Veneto. She also contributed to the forthcoming exhibition and catalog, An Antiquity of Imagination : Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Alison Luchs, to be held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 4 July – 31 October 2009. Her book, The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge University Press, 1994), was the first historical assessment of the design and decoration of the burial chapel of St. Anthony of Padua, a major artistic commission of sixteenth-century Italy.  She has also published many essays and articles on fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century sculpture and painting in Tuscany and in the Venetian Empire. She has advised recently completed dissertations on such topics as Medici patronage of art in the Grand Duchy during the late 16th and early 17th century, the role of painted labels (cartellini) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting, Mantegna’s paintings of simulated sculpture, the painted illustrations of Virgil’s pastoral poetry, the depiction of Salome in Renaissance art, Leone Leoni’s Casa degli Omenoni, on the Virgin's Sacred Belt and fifteenth-century artistic commissions at Santo Stefano, Prato; Simone Martini's painting of St. Louis of Toulouse; Ghiberti's sculpture and ritual performance; and on fourteenth-century patronage at San Miniato, Florence.  Recent Awards: Professor Blake McHam is the recipient of two Graduate Teaching Excellence Awards from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (2003) and from Rutgers University (2002). Dr. Blake McHam supervising photography at the Santo in Padua Recent Publications: “Reflections of Pliny in Giovanni Bellini’s Woman with a Mirror,” Artibus et Historiae 58 (2008), 1-15. “Tomba come testamento: Il monumento funerario di Andrea Bregno,” Andrea Bregno: Il senso della forma, ed. Claudio Strinati and Claudio Crescentini, Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2008, 87-98 “Giambologna’s Equestrian Monument to Cosimo I: The Monument Makes the Memory,” The Patronage of Sculpture in the Italian Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Christian and David Drogin, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009 (forthcoming) “La tomba del doge Giovanni Mocenigo: politica e culto dinastico,” Tullio Lombardo, scultore e archtetto nella Venezia del rinascimento, Atti del convegno di studi, Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 4-6 aprile 2006, ed. Matteo Ceriana, Verona: Cierre Grafica, 2007, 81-98. “ Now and Then: Recovering a Sense of Different Values,” Depth of Field, ed. Donal Cooper and Marika Leino, Bern: Peter Lang, 2007, 251-95 “ Oedipal Palimpsest, ” Source. Notes in the History of Art 27, no. 4 (2008), 37-46. "Renaissance Monuments to Favorite Sons," Renaissance Studies , 19, no. 4 (Sept. 2005), 458-86 “Erudition on Display: The ‘Scientific’ Illustrations in Pico della Mirandola’s of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,” Visualizing Medieval Medicine, 1200-1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide, AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Science, Technology and Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 83-114 La Bottega dei Lombardo alla Cappella di Sant’Antonio e la teoria di Pomponio Gaurico, I Lombardo. Architettura e scultura a Venezia tra ‘400 e ‘500, ed. Andrea Guerra, Manuela Morresi, and Richard Schofield, Venice: Marsilio, 2006, 224-39 "Padua, Bassano, and Treviso," Venice and the Veneto, ed. Peter Humfrey, , Cambridge University Press, 2007, 207-51 Structuring Communal History through Repeated Metaphors of Rule. The Interior Decoration of the Palazzo della Signoria,? Renaissance Florence: A Social History, eds. Roger Crum and John T. Paoletti, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 104-37; paperback edition, 2008 "La Scultura esterna di Santa Maria dei Miracoli," in S. Maria dei Miracoli, ed. Mario Piana and Wolfgang Wolters, Venice, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti, 2003, 123-40 "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," The Art Bulletin, LXXXIV, no. 2, March 2001, 32-47 “The Role of Pliny’s Natural History in the Sixteenth-Century Redecoration of the Piazza of San Marco, Venice,” Diverse Approaches to the Representation of Classical Mythology in Art, eds. Luba Freedman and Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Wege zum Mythos. Ikonographische Repertorien zur Rezeption des antiken Mythos in Europa, Beiheft III', Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001, 89-105.  Recent Lectures and Activities: "The Monument Makes the Memory: Ferdinando I's Monument to his Father Cosimo I," Piazza e Monumento Conference, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, November 2008 "The Armchair Traveler's Guide to the Ancient World: Renaissance Readers and Pliny's Natural History," "Travel, Trade, and Translation in Early Modern Europe," New England Renaissance Conference, Wesleyan University, October 2008 "Donatello's Judith as an Emblem of God's Chosen People: The Statue's Political Meanings after 1495," Keynote Address, Sixth Quadrennial Italian Renaissance Sculpture Conference, Memphis, October 2008 "Savonarola's Interpretation of Judith," The Sword of Judith Conference, New York Public Library, April 2008 Louis Martz Plenary Lecture, "Inscriptions in Renaissance Art: Pliny Creates Cultural Capital," South-Central Renaissance Conference, March 2008 Organizer and Chair, Six Sessions, "Renaissance Rulers Construct Identity," Renaissance Society of America Meetings, Chicago, April 2008 Seminar on Fourteenth through Sixteenth- Century Italian Images of Women and their Worlds Selection Committee, Officers of the Renaissance Society of America, 2007- Organizing Committee, Interdisciplinary Conference on the "Sword of Judith" and Adviser re establishing online sites organizing the NYPL's textual and visual resources related to the theme of Judith, New York Public Library, 2007- " Piazza e Monumento" Project Planning Committee, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, 2007- Gordon Book Prize Committee, Renaissance Society of America, 2006, 2008 Discipline Representative, Renaissance Society of America, 2005-11 Editorial Board, Renaissance Quarterly, 2005- Longer list of publications

Contact:
    Phone: 732-932-0122 Ext. 15
    Email Dr. Blake McHam

Office Hours:

Current Interests & Research:

·	Revival of antiquity in Renaissance art and literature
·	Social and political context of painting and sculpture of the Venetian Empire and of Florence, especially patronage and religious practices.
·	Ïmages of Stability: Rhetorical Construction of Identity in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy

Undergraduate Classes Taught:

·	Age of Giotto, Masaccio and his Contemporaries
·	Italian High Renaissance and Mannerist Art
·	Venice: The City and its Art
·	Italian Renaissance Domestic Art
·	Italian Renaissance Sculpture
·	Public Monuments, 19th-21st Centuries

Graduate Classes Taught:

·	"Venice, Verona and Padua"
·	The Role of Italian Art and Architecture in the Promotion of New Saints, c. 1250-1450
·	Secular Art in Italy, c. 1300-1520
·	Public Sculpture in Renaissance Italy
·	Relations among Painting, Sculpture, Illuminated Manuscripts and Books in Venice and the Veneto, 1440-1540
·	Seminar on Early Fifteenth-Century Florentine Sculpture 2008
·	Seminar on Artisans into Artists 2007
·	Seminar on Mantegna 2006

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