News - November 14, 2008

SUF Director’s research leads to symposium and exhibit

Imagine working as an artist at the dawn of the Renaissance. As the old and familiar Gothic traditions fade into twilight, innovations, such as those introduced by Masaccio, emerge on the horizon. The late 14th century Florentine artist Tommaso del Mazza lived and worked at such a time. SUF Director Barbara Deimling was the keynote speaker at Bob Jones University Art Gallery (BJU) for the symposium Tommaso del Mazza and the Florentine Tradition, the first ever by any museum to feature the artist’s works.

The symposium took place in conjunction with the opening at BJU of the exhibit The Twilight of a Tradition, and included representative works from each phase of his career. While the goal of the exhibition was to introduce the artist to a wider public audience and recognition within the museum community, the symposium also focused on the examination of a set of three paintings dated to the last decade of the Trecento, comprised of a central panel on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum depicting the Annunciation, together with the wings from the M&G collection depicting Ss. Jude Thaddeus and St. John the Evangelist on the left and St. Paul and a Deacon on the right.

Says John Nolan, Curator of the Museum & Gallery at BJU, “The journey to the present exhibit and symposium began three years ago surrounding a conversation about these three panels. I read Barbara Deimling’s Corpus entries on our paintings regarding the proposal of our wings as a match with the Getty’s central panel a year or two before and was intrigued at the connection.”

In 1991, Deimling convincingly connected Tommaso del Mazza with documents describing the commission of the polyptych for the church of San Francesco in Prato in 1392. She subsequently wrote the primary scholarly reference on his career in the monumental series, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. The publication advanced further reconstruction and understanding the artist’s career and became the standard reference for the artist. Thus Deimling was a natural choice for keynote speaker.

Other symposium speakers included Carl Strehlke, Curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Yvonne Szafran, conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum; and John Nolan, Curator of the Museum & Gallery at BJU.

Deimling’s keynote speech, in essay form, will be featured in the forthcoming exhibit catalogue, Discovering a Pre-Renaissance Master: Tommaso del Mazza. The question of whether the three panels were originally a set has been analyzed on a number of fronts including construction, pigments and gesso samples, style, and punch work. Says Deimling, “As is often the case in studies in art history, a firm conclusion remains elusive. Some of the observations suggest the panels’ connection as a triptych. Other elements raise more questions. However, the important technical analyses that have been done by the restorers of the Getty Museum and analyzed and presented by conservator Yvonne Szafran will serve as an important case study for how Trecento paintings were constructed and executed.”

A call for excellence: professors submit selected student nominees for Coluccio Salutati Prize

Faculty members have submitted their nominees for SUF’s Coluccio Salutati Prize, a merit award for undergraduate and graduate students intended to recognize those who have aspired to the highest level of integration into the Italian culture, as well as those who have demonstrated academic achievement through their performance in class. Nominated students will then be invited to submit an essay by November 26, either in English or Italian, on some aspect of their experience in Italy. Winners will be announced December 2, and the five winning students will be honored at the Student Day celebration on December 11.