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Robertson, Clare

    Full Name: Robertson, Clare

    Other Names:

    • Elizabeth Clare Robertson

    Gender: female

    Date Died: 2020

    Place Born: UK

    Place Died: UK

    Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

    Subject Area(s): Baroque, Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

    Career(s): art historians

    Institution(s): University of London and Warburg Institute


    Overview

    Art historian of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, specializing in artistic patronage in sixteenth and seventeenth century Rome. Robertson received her Ph.D. from the Warburg Institute, University of London, ca. 1986. Her dissertation, “The Artistic Patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-89),” reconstructed the cardinal’s commissions through archival material and printed sources. She examined the influence of his artistic advisers and the extent to which his personal taste shaped the works he commissioned.

    She joined the History of Art department at the University of Reading as a lecturer in 1988. Robertson published  “Il Gran Cardinale”: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts in 1992, with the book winning the Eric Mitchell Prize in 1993. Il Gran Cardinale was widely praised for its thorough archival research, documentation of Farnese patronage, and value as an important reference work for sixteenth-century Italian art. While commending the book’s substantial contribution to the study of Farnese patronage, reviewer Thomas Willette suggested her approach was “nearly oblivious to scholarship in institutional, family, and political history.” He argued that the study’s primary focus on artistic production and patronage left less room for the broader social and political contexts of patronage.

    She held a Kress Fellowship from Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies) from 1992-93, and returned as a visiting professor from 1995-96. During the 1990s, she also served for several years as Head of Department at Reading. In 1996, she co-curated Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with Catherine Whistler.

    As a Research Fellow of the British School at Rome, she studied the city’s artistic life around 1600, with support from a Leverhulme Fellowship from 2003-2006. She published The Invention of Annibale Carracci in 2008, examining invention in the artist’s work, particularly through his drawings. Having become a Reader at Reading, she was appointed Professor in 2009.

    Throughout her career, she published in journals including The Burlington Magazine , Master Drawings , and the Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana . She also served on the founding editorial board of Oxford Bibliographies in Art History in 2010. She published Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts Under Clement VIII in 2016. She remained at Reading throughout her teaching career and held the title of Emeritus Professor by the time of her death in 2020.


    Selected Bibliography

    • “Annibale Carracci and Invenzione: Medium and Function in the Early Drawings.” Master Drawings 35, no. 1 (1997): 3–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1554287.
    • “Il gran cardinale”: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts. Yale University Press, 1992.
    • Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts under Clement VIII. Yale University Press, 2016. 
    • The Invention of Annibale Carracci. Silvana, 2008.

    Sources



    Contributors: Amalia Gay


    Citation

    Amalia Gay. "Robertson, Clare." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/robertson-clare/.


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