STEPHAN WOLOHOJIAN APPOINTED ASSOCIATE CURATOR OF PAINTINGS, SCULPTURE, AND DECORATIVE ARTS

Cambridge, MA - March 1999 - Stephan Wolohojian has been appointed associate curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums. Wolohojian will be primarily responsible for fostering the appreciation and understanding of Italian Renaissance Art. His appointment begins in September 1999.

"Stephan's appointment underscores the importance of Italian Renaissance paintings in the Fogg's collection," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Art Museums. "Stephan's expertise in the earliest of the Fogg's collections represents our continuing commitment to the origins of our museums and the importance of the Italian Renaisance to our artistic tradition and to the history of art history."

Wolohojian earned a BA from Rutgers University in 1984, an MA from Harvard in 1986 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 with his doctoral dissertation Closed Encounters: Female Piety and Visual Experience in the Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina in Naples. His recent articles include "A Version of Raphael's Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome and Saint Francis in the Harvard University Art Museums" (in Festschrift for John Shearman, forthcoming) and "Francisco di Simone Ferrucci's Fogg Virgin and Child and the Martini Chapel in S. Giobbe, Venice" (in Burlington Magazine, 139, 1997). His essay "Renaissance Plaquettes from the Collection of Grenville Winthrop" will appear in a Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin this fall.

Wolohojian is currently assistant professor of art history at the University of Delaware. He has been a visiting assistant professor at John Cabot College, Rome, Italy, a lecturer at Tufts University and a teaching fellow at Harvard University. From 1995 to 1997 he served as a curatorial intern in the Fogg's Department of Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts as a co-organizer of the major reinstallation Investigating the Renaissance, which opened in Warburg Hall and two adjacent galleries on the first floor of the Fogg in 1996. Wolohojian has presented papers on Italian Renaissance art as several universities and museums in the US and Italy.
Italian painting, particularly that of the early Renaissance, has long played an important role in the history of the Fogg Art Museum. Early Renaissance paintings were among the first and most important acquisitions made by the early directors of the Fogg Art Museum and were an expression of their belief that familiarity with the history of Italian painting was central to understanding the entire history of art. That belief was espoused by Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard's first professor of the history of art. Edward W. Forbes, class of 1895 and a former student of Norton, inaugurated the Fogg's collection of Italian paintings in 1899 with his gift of The Adoration of the Magi, attributed at the time to Marcello Fogolino. After assuming the directorship in 1909, Forbes and Paul Sachs, who joined him as assistant director in 1915, added over 200 Italian paintings to the collection during their joint tenure at the museum.

Forbes and Sachs resigned their posts in 1944, but the importance of Italian painting in the growing Fogg collection has not waned. For more than twenty years until his retirement in 1983, Sydney Freedberg, the distinguished specialist in Italian Renaissance and Mannerist art and Professor of Fine Aert at Harvard, oversaw the development of the Fogg's collection of Italian paintings. The collection now comprises almost 450 such paintings. The collection is particularly strong in works of the early Renaissance, including a Crucifixion by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Virgin Enthroned with Angels by Spinello Aretino, The Stigmatization of Saint Francis by Taddeo Gaddi, Christ on the Cross Between the Virgin, Cardinal Torquemada and Saint John the Evangelist by Fra Angelico, and Saint Jerome in the Desert with Saints John the Baptist and Ansanus by Filippo Lippi. The sixteenth century is also well represented, including a Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist by Bernardino Luini, Portrait of a Man by Dosso Dossi, A Dominican Friar as Saint Peter Martyr by Lorenzo Lotto and a Personification of Fidelity by Domenico Tintoretto. The collection also includes a number of important later canvases such as The Virgin with the Sleeping Christ Child by Orazio Gentileschi, and Piazza San Marco, Venice by Canaletto.

The Harvard University Art Museums consists of the Fogg Art Museum (founded in 1891, opened in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (founded in 1902, now housed in Werner Otto Hall), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (opened in 1985). The Straus Center for Conservation is located in the Fogg. Through their collections, the Art Museums serve Harvard University as a catalyst for the instruction and scholarship, as a training ground for future academic art historians and museum professionals, and as a general resource for the greater-Boston area and all parts of the world.

The collections of the Art Museums consist of more than 150,000 objects in all media, with works ranging from antiquity to the present and from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, the collections comprise a unique resource in terms of breadth and quality, and are one of the finest university art collections in the world.

The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and to all on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For tour information, please call (617) 496-8576. Web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.