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Hall, Marcia B.

    Full Name: Hall, Marcia B.

    Other Names:

    • Marcia B. Hall

    Gender: female

    Date Born: 1939

    Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

    Home Country/ies: United States

    Subject Area(s): Renaissance

    Career(s): educators


    Overview

    Temple University professor of Renaissance art. Marcia Brown’s father was Charles Edward Brown (1894-1949), a business executive, and mother Frances Peebles [later Ocheltree] (1901-1991). Brown attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1960. She married the Dean of Wellesley’s Chapel, Charles Arthur Mann Hall (1924-1990), fifteen years her senior, in 1961, receiving her master’s degree from Radcliffe College the following year. Brown, now Hall, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1963 to research her dissertation on the late-16th-century renovations to S. Maria Novella and S. Croce, a thesis supervised primarily by Sydney Joseph Freedberg. Her Ph.D. was granted from Harvard in 1967. In 1971 she was awarded a fellowship for the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. Hall was appointed assistant professor at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 1973. Her first NEH fellowship was granted in 1979 (others in 1995 and 2006). That same year, her first book, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, was published. The book examines the renovations of two principal Mendicant churches in Florence which the Council of Trent mandated be more accessible to the laity in image and space. Hall’s second interest, artist’s materials, resulted in several conferences on Renaissance artists’ color. She was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for the 1987-1988 year. Together with John Kinder Gowran Shearman, she organized 1983 The Princeton Raphael Symposium, which combined the scholarship of conservators and art historians, co-editing the conference papers as Color & Technique in Renaissance Painting, 1990. Hall produced her Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting in 1992. In 1999, her book After Raphael, focused on the art of 16th-century Mannerism. She held a second I Tatti fellowship, now as a Senior Visitor, in 2006.


    Selected Bibliography

    [dissertation:] Art of the Counter-Maniera in Florence: the Renovation of S. Maria Novella and S. Croce, 1565-1576. Harvard, 1967; Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, 1565-77. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; and Shearman, John, eds. Science in the Service of Art History. Princeton Raphael Symposium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling Restored. New York: Rizzoli, 1993; After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. New York: Abrams, 2002.


    Sources

    CV, Temple University, http://www.temple.edu/tyler/arthistory/CVhall; “Brown, Charles Edward.” National Cyclopedia of American Biography 44: 581;




    Citation

    "Hall, Marcia B.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hallm/.


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