Awards
2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art
Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011)
Alexander Nagel’s The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a tour de force that at once complicates and enriches our understanding of Italian Renaissance art through a compelling reexamination of the key paradoxes that define this era and the works associated with it. Guided in part by sixteenth-century religious history and the writings of historians of that era, Nagel positions sixteenth-century art making in the realm of the experimental, a vantage also in concert with the efforts of religious reformers concerned with ritual and devotional practices usually associated with the Middle Ages. The Controversy of the Renaissance is a breakthrough volume that makes significant contributions to the field of sixteenth-century Italian art and motivates art historians more generally to reconsider “standard” interpretations of some of the most canonical monuments of the periods in which they are working. This masterfully written and handsomely illustrated volume is framed in part around a set of thematic subsections that also provide an important new lens into the issues explored.
Jury: Benjamin Withers, University of Kentucky, chair; Suzanne Blier, Harvard University; Cammy Brothers, University of Virginia; Sarah Burns, Indiana University; and Robert Randolf Coleman, University of Notre Dame.
