Cropper, Elizabeth 1944–

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Cropper, Elizabeth 1944–

PERSONAL:

Born August 11, 1944; married Charles Dempsey. Education: Cambridge University, B.A. (honors); Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—National Gallery of Art, 200B South Club Dr., Landover, MD 20785.

CAREER:

Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, professor; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, professor, 1985—; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, dean of Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2000—. Visiting professorships at d'Études Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1990-91 and 1997; Collège de France, 1996.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Mitchell Prize, 1997, and Charles Rufus Morey Award, 1998, both for Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting.

WRITINGS:

The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Düsseldorf Notebook, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1984.

Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), 1988.

(Author of introduction) Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera, Irsa (Vienna, Austria), 1992.

(Editor, with Giovanna Perini and Francesco Solinas) Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence 1990, Nuova Alfa Editoriale (Bologna, Italy), 1992.

(Editor and author of introduction) Florentine Drawings at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1992, Nuova Alfa Editoriale (Bologna, Italy), 1994.

(With Charles Dempsey) Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1996.

Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier, Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), 1997.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Diplomacy of Art: Artistic Creation and Politics in Seicento Italy: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1998, Nuova Alfa Editoriale (Milan, Italy), 2000.

(Contributor) Carl Brandon Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), 2004.

The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Art historian Elizabeth Cropper, dean of the National Gallery of Art's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, has written extensively about Renaissance and Baroque painting. In The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Düsseldorf Notebook, she bases her study of the Italian painter and printmaker Pietro Testa (1612-1650) on the notes and drawings that were bound together after the artist's drowning death at age thirty-eight and are known as the "Düsseldorf Notebook." In addition to her analysis of Testa's work and career, Cropper also discusses wider theoretical issues such as the nature of art and the ideal of painting. Reviewing the book in the Renaissance Quarterly, Catherine R. Puglisi observed that Cropper presents "the most complete discussion to date of the artist's life and principal works."

Cropper also wrote Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings, a catalog of the exhibition that toured the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1988 and Harvard University's Arthur Sackler Museum in 1989. The book, to which Cropper's husband, Charles Dempsey, and others contributed, includes detailed descriptions of 128 of Testa's drawings and prints, as well as four in-depth essays.

Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, which Cropper wrote with Dempsey, attracted considerable critical attention. As Times Literary Supplement contributor Norman Bryson explained in his review of the book, the work of the French painter Poussin (1594-1665) is not very accessible to modern viewers because it seems cold and remote. The painter relied on classical influences and motifs that are no longer familiar to popular audiences, and employed techniques that, compared with the work of Titian or Caravaggio, resulted in relatively small and unimpressive figures. Art historians have struggled to understand Poussin's work and explain its importance to modern viewers. Cropper and Dempsey, according to Bryson, "have the great virtue of being unafraid to tackle the radical questions raised by Poussin's painting; in a field where heat is typically generated by wrangling over chronology and attribution, their Nicolas Poussin is a book of strong interpretations."

The book's general thesis is that many of the elements that modern viewers find difficult to understand and appreciate in Poussin's work come from the way the painter organized images around what Cropper and Dempsey call "friendship." This term, however, means something far different from modern definitions of the word. As Bryson summarized, the term refers to the "bond forged between social equals by their intellectual judgment and conversation, and especially the exchange of their ideas about human life in general, and the place within that of pleasure, the senses and the body, the life of the mind, self-cultivation, as well as maturity, age and mortality." For those within Poussin's circle of such friendship, then, the artist's references in his paintings to classical architecture or to passages from Latin poetry were familiar because, in Bryson's words, such "learning was a currency warm from social use, the basis of commonality and fraternity."

Cropper and Dempsey identify several individuals whose social relationship to Poussin was important in the artist's work. These include Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who published one of the first illustrated records of an art collection when he documented his own collection of antiquities starting in 1631; Cassiano dal Pozzo, whose position as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini put Poussin in touch with the wealth and influence of the Vatican; and the artist's French patron, Paul Freart de Chantelou. Cropper and Dempsey also discuss Poussin's interest in Montaigne's Essais and in Latin poetry, his assessments of art theory, and his view of the dynamics of art patronage. For Art Bulletin contributor David Carrier, who appreciated Nicolas Poussin's "valuable corrective to earlier scholarship" on the painter, the "most interesting parts of Cropper and Dempsey's account are … their suggestion that Poussin's art involves ‘an emerging awareness … of pure and unmediated sensory response to forms in and of themselves,’ in ways that anticipate the eighteenth-century ideal of the aesthetic and their claim that in his time ‘we can discern the workings of a revised concept of artistic value, one based in an emerging criticism of purely visual expression founded in an idea of psychological response to form.’"

In The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Cropper examines the first instance in which a painter was accused of plagiarizing another artist's work. The controversy arose when Giovanni Lanfranco accused Domenichino of taking the composition of his altarpiece, The Last Communion of St. Jerome, from a painting done by Agostino Carracci twenty years earlier. The affair, Cropper explains, challenged traditional ideas about the practice of imitation in painting and led to new thinking about influence and originality. Commenting that the book "should become a classic," Renaissance Quarterly contributor Ann Sutherland Harris wrote that Cropper "takes on the core issue of originality, imitation, and theft as understood by the artists' peers and later art critics, both literary and visual. Her text ranges from patient close reading of every nook and cranny of both paintings to the perpetual problem of defining originality in any artistic endeavor, literary or visual, past and present."

Louise Rice, writing in the Art Bulletin, expressed similar enthusiasm for The Domenichino Affair. The book, she observed, "focuses on one of those moments in the history of art when, as [Cropper] would have it, ‘the rules were seriously challenged." By investigating Domenichino's painting in all its dimensions, she opens our eyes to its extraordinary beauty and sophistication even as she argue compellingly for its critical place in art history and theory."

In Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier, Cropper investigates the identity of Pontormo's subject in the title painting. In 1568 a contemporary of the artist noted that the subject was Francesco Guardi, but in 1612 the painting was described as a portrait of Cosimo de'Medici. Cropper argues that Pontormo's subject was indeed Guardi, and provides information on how art historians establish the identity of individuals and places depicted in art works.

Among the books that Cropper has edited are Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1992, and The Diplomacy of Art: Artistic Creation and Politics in Seicento Italy: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1998.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cropper, Elizabeth, The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2005.

Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Art Bulletin, September, 1998, David Carrier, "Nicolas Poussin: Actes Du Colloque Organise Au Musee Du Louvre," p. 569; September, 1998, David Carrier, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 569; December, 2006, Louise Rice, review of The Domenichino Affair, p. 779.

British Journal of Aesthetics, April, 1997, A.W. Price, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 177.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 1996, F.W. Robinson, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 1630; June, 2005, P. Emison, review of Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, p. 1811; April, 2006, P. Emison, review of The Domenichino Affair, p. 1389.

Journal of Modern History, June, 1998, Peter N. Miller, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 470.

New York Review of Books, July 20, 1989, Francis Haskell, review of Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings, p. 36.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 1994, review of Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1992, p. 37.

Renaissance Quarterly, winter, 1991, Rona Goffen, review of Pietro Testa, 1612-1650; spring, 1996, Mary Vaccaro, review of Mannerism and Maniera; summer, 1996, review of Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent; summer, 1996, James Beck, review of Florentine Drawings at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent; spring, 1997, Joanne Snow-Smith, review of Nicolas Poussin; summer, 2000, review of Nicolas Poussin; fall, 2006, Ann Sutherland Harris, review of The Domenichino Affair.

Sixteenth Century Journal, fall, 1993, Michelle M. Fontaine, review of Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence 1990; fall, 1997, Robert W. Gaston, review of Nicolas Poussin.

Times Literary Supplement, November 8, 1996, Norman Bryson, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 12