Scientific council
Bernard Aikema
Graduated from the University of Amsterdam. He was a professor at Nijmegen University (The Netherlands) and Leuven University (Belgium). He was also a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard Universities. He has organized conferences on Venetian art in many European countries and in North America. He has written more than 100 articles and books in English and Italian on Venetian painting and drawing. His research methods range from philology and iconology to the social history of art. In 2021 he published I Rinascimenti in Europa 1480-1620. Arte, geografia e potere, a new history of Renaissance art, told not from the usual chronological point of view, but following an innovative geographical criterion by cultural areas. He conceived and co-curated exhibitions at the Cini Foundation in Venice, in Amsterdam and in New York. In 1999 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, he co-curated Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer and Titian. In 2010 at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, he co-curated the exhibition Lucas Cranach: The Other Renaissance. In 2014 at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona, he co-curated the exhibition Paolo Veronese: L’illusione della realtà. In 2017 he curated the exhibition for Palazzo Ducale ‘Jheronimus Bosch and Venice’ and was supervisor of the exhibition ‘Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese’ at the Puskin Museum in Moscow. In 2018 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, he curated the exhibition ‘Albrecht Dürer and the Renaissance between Germany and Italy’ and in 2022 ‘Bosch and Another Renaissance’. He heads international research projects and is a member of the Ateneo Veneto and of the European Academy. He is a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo
Born in Padua in 1963, is Associate Professor of the History of Modern Art at the University of Verona, where he has been teaching Museology and the History of Collecting, the History of Venetian Art and the Historical-artistic Research Methods since 1999.
From 2000 to 2002 he taught Methodology of Historic-Artistic Research at the University of Venice (Ca’ Foscari). He is involved primarily with Venetian Renaissance painting.
He has published approximately 100 scholarly papers on Italian art, as well as monographs, including Lorenzo Lotto ad Asolo: Una pala e i suoi segreti,( Venice, Il Cardo, 1995); Giovanni Bonconsiglio detto Marescalco (Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana Editoriale, 1998); Colori d’amore. Parole, gesti e carezze nella pittura veneziana del Cinquecento (Canova, Treviso, 2008); Giorgione (Federico Motta, Milan, 2009); and Pittura Veneta (24 Ore Cultura, Milano, 2010).
He is on the scientific committee of Venezia Cinquecento.
With Antonio Paolucci and Lionello Puppi, he co-curated the exhibition on Giorgione held in Castelfranco Veneto from 12.12.2009 to 11.04.2010. With Irina Artemieva of the Hermitage State Museum in Saint Petersburg and Andrea Bayer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York he is preparing an exhibition for the Palazzo Reale in Milan called Rinascimento privato. He recently edited the catalogue Lorenzo Lotto. Catalogo generale dei dipinti.
Miguel Falomir
Miguel Falomir (1966) holds a doctorate in the History of Art and is Ordinary Professor at the University of Valencia (Spain). Since 1997, he has been the curator for Italian Renaissance Painting at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where he has curated several exhibitions, including Una obra maestra restaurada. El Lavatorio de Jacopo Tintoretto(2000); Los Bassano en la España del siglo de Oro (2001); Tiziano (2003), Tintoretto(2007), El retrato del Renacimiento (2008), Tiziano. San Juan Bautista (2012); Las Furias, alegoría política y desafío artístico (2014), and Dánae y Venus y Adonis, las primeras poesías de Tiziano para Felipe II (2014).
He was the Andrew Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts (CASVA) of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2008-2010), and has also written numerous publications published in Europe and the United States. He is currently completing the catalogue raisonné on Titian for the Museo del Prado.
Sylvia Ferino-Pagden
Director of the Gemäldegalerie at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna until 2014, in 2015/16 she was Rudolf Wittkower-Professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome.
She studied Art History at the University of Vienna and Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, obtaining her Magister Artium and Doctorate. Research Fellowships at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at St. Hugh’s College Oxford, at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck- Institut) in Rome, at the Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities. Professor at the Universities of Perugia, Zurich, Vienna.
As head of Italian Renaissance painting she curated numerous exhibitions and directed scientific projects at the Kunsthistorisches Museum financed by various Austrian research funds, including in 2021 the exhibition Titian’s Vision of Women. In 2022, she curated the exhibition Titian and the Image of Women in Sixteenth-Century Venice in Milan, at the Palazzo Reale. She is a member of international commissions and scientific committees.
She has been awarded various international prizes and honours, including the Order of Officer of the Italian Republic.
Augusto Gentili
Formerly Ordinary Professor of the History of Modern Art at Cà Foscari University of Venice. He is a scholar of 15th- and 16th-century Venetian art with a multidisciplinary approach to iconography and cultural history.
He currently works on the documentary sources and the historical framework illuminating the religious paintings of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. He is also particularly interested in issues regarding the theory, method and history of artistic historiography.
He has published books on Carpaccio, Lotto and Titian and more than 150 articles and short monographs. His most recent book is La bilancia dell’arcangelo. Vedere i dettagli nella pittura veneziana del Cinquecento, (The Scales of the Archangel: Seeing the Details in 16th-Century Venetian Painting), Rome, Bulzoni, 2009.
He founded, runs and curates the biannual periodical, Venezia Cinquecento, now approaching its twentieth year of publication.
Frederick Ilchman
Currently Director of the Department of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and also Curator of European Paintings, a position he has held since 2009. He began at the MFA in 2001 as Assistant Curator of Paintings. A specialist in Italian Renaissance art, he has curated numerous exhibitions, organised international conferences, contributed to scholarly publications, and taught in America and abroad. Ilchman’s much-acclaimed exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (2009), organised with the Musée du Louvre in Paris, was the first important exhibition dedicated to the competition between these renowned artists and the affirmation of their distinctive styles. The exhibition won various awards, including “Outstanding Exhibition (Eastern Time Zone)” from the Association of Art Museum Curators and was mentioned as one of the best ten exhibitions of 2009 by the Wall Street Journal. In October 2014, he co-curated the exhibition Goya: Order and Disorder, which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2003, he worked as Boston curator for the Thomas Gainsborough, 1727—1788, a travelling exhibition and important retrospective organised by Tate Britain in London. He was part of the group of curators for the Tintoretto exhibition (2007) at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. He recently curated Visiting Masterpiece: Piero della Francesca’s Senigallia Madonna: An Italian Treasure, Stolen and Recovered (2013) and co-curated the exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and his Workshop in Renaissance Venice (2012) at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida.
Since 2005 he has been on the board of directors of the American committee of Save Venice Inc., the largest organization involved with preservation of art and architecture in Venice and is now also the director of its scientific committee. He has held the position of Chairman of the Boston Chapter of Save Venice since 2011.
He received an undergraduate degree in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude (1990), as well as a Master’s degree in Art (1992) and a PhD (1996) from Columbia University, New York. He received a research doctorate in the History of Art from Columbia University in May 2014. He has won several grants, including the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant (2006), Save Venice Inc. Art History Fellowship (1999–2001), the Theodore Rousseau Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996–1997, 1998–1999) and the Fulbright Fellowship (IIE), Italia (1997–1998). In 2010, he was a member of the Center for Curatorial Management in New York City.
Stefania Mason
Formerly Ordinary Professor of History of Modern Art and Director of the School of History of Art at the University of Udine. Her research focuses on Venetian painting and graphic art between the 15th and 17th centuries, including foreign artists active in the Veneto such as Paolo Fiammingo and Ludovico Pozzoserrato. She has undertaken a systematic study of Palma il Giovane and published the catalogue raisonné of his work as well as major studies on Vittore Carpaccio and the atelier of Jacopo Bassano.
She has participated in many international conferences (Braunschweig 1984; Roma 1996 e 2002; Bordeaux 2006; Vienna 2007; Madrid 2007; Paris 2007; New York 2011; Cambridge 2013) and served on the scientific committee of numerous exhibitions on Venetian painting as well as contributing to the catalogues of these exhibitions.
She organized and directed the project “Il collezionismo artistico a Venezia dalle origini al Settecento” (Art Collecting in Venice, from its Origins to the 18th Century), overseeing the publication of three volumes (Venezia/Marsilio Foundation, 2007, 2008, 2009). She has published approximately 100 articles in Italian and international periodicals as well as essays in the acts of congresses, entries in exhibition catalogues and various monographic works.
She is part of the scientific committee of Arte Veneta, Studi tizianeschi, ArtsItalies and is member of the academic committee of the Ateneo Veneto.