DEMPSEY, Charles (Gates) 1937-

PERSONAL: Born March 11, 1937, in Providence, RI; son of Edward Wheeler and Betsey (Mills) Dempsey; married Marjorie Elizabeth Cropper, November 14, 1975; children: Martha Martin, Adam Sell, Catherine Wheeler. Education: Swarthmore College, B.A., 1959; Princeton University, M.F.A., 1962, Ph.D., 1963.

ADDRESSES: Office—Dept. of the History of Art, Mergenthaler Hall, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218; fax: 410-516-5188. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator and art historian. American Academy, Rome, Italy, fellow in the history of art; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 1965-80, began as assistant professor, became professor of history of art, chair, 1975-80; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, professor of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, 1980—; Johns Hopkins Center for Italian Studies, Florence, Italy, director of studies, 1980-85. Visiting professor in the United States, France, and Australia; served on various boards and advisory panels.

MEMBER: U.S. National Committee for the History of Art, International Committee for the History of Art.

AWARDS, HONORS: Research grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1967, and American Philosophical Society, 1968; American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, 1969-70; Christian K. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation award for distinguished teaching, Bryn Mawr College, 1970; A. Kingsley Porter Prize (shared), College Art Association, 1970; Ford Foundation stipend, 1972; Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, fellow, 1973-74; elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993; Jan Mitchell Prize, and Charles Rufus Morey Award, both 1996, both for Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting.

WRITINGS:

Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (number three, "Villa I Tatti Monograph" series), Augustin (Glckstadt, Germany), 1977, revised edition, Cadmo (Fiesole, Italy), 2000.

La galerie des Carrache, Banque de Paris (Paris, France), 1984.

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1992.

Annibale Carracci, the Farnese Gallery, G. Braziller (New York, NY), 1995.

(With wife, Elizabeth Cropper) Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1996.

(Editor and author of introduction) Quattrocento Adriatico: Fifteenth-century Art of the Adriatic Rim (colloquium), Nuova Alfa Editorial (Bologna, Italy), 1996.

Inventing the Renaissance Putto, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2001.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals and journals, including the Times Literary Supplement, Renaissance Quarterly, American Historical Review, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Art Bulletin, Burlington (magazine), and New Criterion. Contributor to English and foreign-language books, including Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings, by Elizabeth Cropper, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988.

SIDELIGHTS: Art historian Charles Dempsey has written a number of volumes, including his first, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, which was updated and reprinted in 2000. Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), his brother, Agostino (1557-1602), and their cousin, Ludovico (1555-1619), worked together to produce a number of frescos in Bologna during their early years, notably in Palazzo Fava and Palazzo Magnani. Later in Rome, Agostino helped Annibale create the fresco for the ceiling of the gallery of Palazzo Farnese. The work of the Carraccis was not widely celebrated until the last decades of the twentieth century, in part because it is difficult to access and not located in places frequented by tourists. Annibale is considered the most important of the three. Dempsey presents a review of several decades of literature on the Carraccis, with a focus on Annibale.

"The first part of the book is devoted to a discussion of Annibale's use of colour, an aspect of the painter's work which, unlike his revival of classical form, has received little detailed attention," said Nicholas Turner in Apollo. "Dempsey illustrates the influences of Barocci, Correggio, and Veronese on Annibale in a number of analyses of his paintings—perhaps the best and most perceptive part of the book—and concludes that a mind capable of assimilating Renaissance colour traditions and evolving from them a procedure that was peculiarly his own must also have been capable of explicit theory."

Ellis Waterhouse, who reviewed Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote that Dempsey "succeeds in rehabilitating Annibale as an artist of powerful speculative intellect. … He explodes the picture of Agostino as the theoretician as opposed to Annibale the simple artist without intellectual or philosophical interests."

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent is Dempsey's study of the commissioning, ownership, history, and past interpretations of "Primavera," painted in the fifteenth century by Sandro Botticelli, who is most noted for his "Birth of Venus." Dempsey provides his interpretation of the scene—a bucolic meadow that includes nine men and women whose identities have been assessed by art historians through the years.

Charles Trinkaus, who in a Renaissance Quarterly review called the volume "magnificent," noted that Dempsey "returns to Warburg's placement of the Primavera in the Latin and Tuscan poetic traditions, influenced also by the work of Pierre Francastel of the 1950s. Painting, especially symbolic and mythological painting, functions more like a poem than like a philosophical proposition. And rather than turning to logic and dialectic to discover its meaning, grammar and rhetoric would provide the key. Dempsey treats the painting as a visual poem."

Anthony Grafton said in London Review of Books that Dempsey "argues that Botticelli meant to evoke the 'rustic calendar' of the Roman Republic—a calendar which had only ten months, and in which Aphrodite was clearly associated with April, Mercury with May. Julius Caesar's reform of the calendar would have obscured these relationships, since it changed the relation of the calendar months to the seasons. In portraying them, accordingly, Botticelli showed formidable knowledge of history and antiquities." Grafton concluded that Dempsey "has written an erudite and stimulating book on a subject that one might have thought exhausted."

Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting is a volume of art history about the sixteenth-century painter that draws on lectures by the authors. A. W. Price wrote in the British Journal of Aesthetics that "this excellent book, finely and amply produced, is of a kind to inform a sober aesthetics. It reminds us of three things that put theory in its place: the contingency from which art derives its features of form as of content; the interconnections of the aesthetically profound and the historically minute (depth being that which always invites further deepening through ancillary investigation); and the inadequacy even of the best writing about art to the art best worth writing about. Exploring facets of Poussin's art in context, the authors, reveal how genius translated complex circumstance into unequaled opportunity."

As editor of Quattrocento Adriatico: Fifteenth-century Art of the Adriatic Rim, Dempsey assembled a dozen art historians from the United States, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, and Italy in studying the artistic development of this region during this time frame. The articles, which are presented in either English or Italian, "offer us more than a fleeting glimpse of a culture that seems to have been either insufficiently accessible or somewhat ignored until now," commented Yael Even in Sixteenth Century Journal.

Renaissance Quarterly's Robert J. H. Janson-La Palme wrote that "the major and most intriguing discussion centers around sculpture and sculptural problems in this region, famed for its stone and stone workers. … This volume is especially welcome in pointing eastwards in the history of the spread of the Florentine Renaissance. The book provides important basic information (relatively rare in the English literature) and raises issues that should stimulate new interest in the Adriatic area at a time when its physical heritage has come under such barbaric attack."

Inventing the Renaissance Putto, is Dempsey's study of the evolution of the winged infant most often thought of as representing Cupid and love. But this image can also be viewed in Renaissance art exhibiting other emotions, including fear, conflict, surprise, and panic. It is seen playing, making music, stomping grapes, and riding animals, and folklore often refers to the infant as a sprite or little spirit. Dempsey also notes the putto as a disturbing image in the work of Poliziano and Botticelli, whose Mars and Venus, portrays them as demonic, sporting horns and hooves.

Lauro Martines said in the Times Literary Supplement that "drawing inventively on a rich body of scholarship … Dempsey uses these findings as a point of departure for a fresh and remarkable study."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Apollo, March, 1979, Nicholas Turner, review of Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, pp. 237-239.

Art Bulletin, September, 1998, David Carrier, review of Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, p. 569.

Art History, December, 1994, Evelyn Welch, review of The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture in the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, p. 658; June, 1998, Anabel Thomas, review of Quattrocentro Adriatico: Fifteenth-century Art of the Adriatic Rim, p. 290.

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

Burlington, January, 1979, Donald Posner, review of Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, pp. 44-45.

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

London Review of Books, June 10, 1993, Anthony Grafton, review of The Portrayal of Love, p. 30-31.

New York Review of Books, June 24, 1993, John Pope-Hennessy, review of The Portrayal of Love, 42-44.

Renaissance Quarterly, winter, 1991, Rona Goffen, review of Pietro Testa, 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings, pp. 845-847; summer, 1995, Charles Trinkaus, review of The Portrayal of Love, p. 420; spring, 1997, Joanne Snow-Smith, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 312; spring, 1999, Robert J. H. Janson-La Palme, review of Quattrocentro Adriatico, p. 234; summer, 2000, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 617.

Sixteenth Century Journal, winter, 1994, Cristelle L. Baskins, review of The Portrayal of Love, p. 939; fall, 1997, Robert W. Gaston, review of Nicolas Poussin, p. 993; winter, 1998, Yael Even, review of Quattrocento Adriatico, pp. 1151-1153.

Times Literary Supplement, September 15, 1978, Ellis Waterhouse, review of Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, p. 1030; April 2, 1993, Virginia Cox, review of The Portrayal of Love, p. 12; March 30, 2001, David Ekserdjian, review of Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style, pp. 10-11; November 9, 2001, Lauro Martines, review of Inventing the Renaissance Putto, p. 22.*