Campbell, Stephen J. 1963–

(Stephen Campbell, Stephen John Campbell)

PERSONAL:

Born 1963, in Dublin, Ireland. Education: Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, B.A., 1985; University of North Carolina, M.A., 1987; Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of the History of Art, 257 Mergenthaler Hall, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218. E-mail—stephen.campbell@jhu.edu.

CAREER:

Art historian, educator, writer, and editor. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, faculty member, 1993-94; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, faculty member, 1995-99; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, faculty member, 1999-2002; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, faculty member in the Department of the History of Art, 2002—. Doctoral fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 1994-95; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy, 1999-2000; and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, DC, 2005-06. Guest curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, 2002, for the exhibition Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara.

WRITINGS:

The Great Irish Famine: Words and Images from the Famine Museum, Strokestown Park, County Roscommon, Famine Museum (Strokestown Park, Ireland), 1994.

Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1997.

(Editor and author of introduction, with Stephen J. Milner) Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(Editor and author of introduction) Artists at Court: Image-making and Identity, 1300-1550, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA), 2004.

(As Stephen Campbell) The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

Also contributor, coeditor, and curator of Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara (exhibition catalogue), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stephen J. Campbell is an art historian who specializes in Italian art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with a special focus on the artistic culture of North Italian court centers and on the painters Cosmè Tura and Andrea Mantegna. His research focuses primarily on the relation between artistic theory and practice and on literary models of interpretation and imitation, especially concerning how works of art are received in the social and religious realms.

In his 1997 book, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495, Campbell writes about the social influences that helped form the conception and reception of the works of Cosmè Tura (c. 1420-1495), an Italian Early Renaissance painter. In his book, the author examines the prominent painter's status in the Este court and in the urban culture of the area and how his role in both areas influenced his idiosyncratic style. Examining Tura's paintings from the viewpoints of both the artist and his patrons, the author presents various religious, ethnic, and political themes in Tura's work, including works such as the cycle of paintings of the Muses and the organ shutters for the cathedral at Ferrara, which include pagan gods along with a depiction of the Annunciation. Referring to the book as "ambitious and beautifully illustrated," Renaissance Quarterly contributor Martha Dunkelman asserted that the author "presents a complicated and multi-layered picture of the milieu in which art was created in Ferrara in the fifteenth century."

Campbell is the editor with Stephen J. Milner of Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City. The book's contributors focus on how the early modern culture in Florence, Rome, and Venice was received by various other cities, particularly on the Italic peninsula. The four essays in the first section examine how patrons and artists interacted on an intellectual level. The second section is titled "Regional Identities and the Encounter with Florence" and includes essays about cultural identity, chivalry and art, and the politics of patronage. Part three, titled "Negotiating the Cultural Other," is comprised of three essays that focus on the Florentine intellectual view of orthodoxy, Egyptian monuments and urban spaces in Italy, and immigrants and church patronage. "Every essay seems to rise, soar above a solid body of footnotes often more spacious, capacious, and long than the text itself, truly the intellectual nuts and bolts that link and sustain each argument, each proposition, each conclusion," wrote Norberto Massi in Renaissance Quarterly. Massi added that the editors' introduction is "an excellent essay" and that various other components of the book add up to "what may be called scholarly bliss."

As the editor of Artists at Court: Image-making and Identity, 1300-1550, Campbell presents scholarly essays that examine the individual works and experiences of artists who became involved in the courts of nobles as a way to further their careers. Among the topics discussed are painting as performance, the influence of royal clients on various artists' works, and the general perceptions of their work. Artists discussed include Raphael Sanzio, usually known only as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and numerous lesser-known painters. Contributors also examine various famous patrons, such as the Dukes of Savoy, Bologna's Bentivoglio family, and the poet Petrarch. In his introduction, Campbell writes about the elevated position of artists due to their court status. "Campbell has brought together a chronologically and geographically wide-ranging series of essays," noted Renaissance Quarterly contributor Jill Burke, who called the collection "lively and rewarding."

In his book The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este, Campbell "investigates the imagery of classical mythology and its place in Renaissance court society," noted Renaissance Quarterly contributor Molly Bourne. The author focuses on the studiolo of D'Este, who was the marchioness of Mantua. The studio included paintings by noted artists who featured mythological images in their works and who highlighted an emerging artistic genre.

The author writes in the book's introduction that The Cabinet of Eros explores "how myth embodied meanings that gave distinction and value to a particular domestic space, the studiolo, notionally devoted to reading and meditation, but in practice the site of elite forms of cultural consumption such as the collection and display of antiquities." The author adds that the book "also explore[s] how this space itself enabled the cultural recuperation of myth, and how the appearance in the studiolo of art with subjects drawn from pagan mythology resulted, in part, from the desire for myth to have a place." The author adds that the myths depicted "represent a serious point of collision with the values of a Christian culture that had long been fascinated with them."

Writing in the Art Bulletin, Giancarlo Fiorenza commented that art historians and other scholars have increasingly begun to explore the special role that women played in art patronage during the Renaissance.

Fiorenza also wrote that "Isabella D'Este … served for many years as the touchstone against which one could measure the collecting ambitions of Renaissance women" and declared that the author "reframes important questions regarding the interpretation of the secular paintings commissioned by Isabella for her private study." Fiorenza praised "the intellectual reward every chapter of Campbell's book offers" and added that "his arguments are consistently provocative and innovative."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Campbell, Stephen, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Art Bulletin, December, 2007, Giancarlo Fiorenza, review of The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este, p. 815.

Burlington, May, 2002, Richard Stemp, "Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara."

Choice, December, 1998, review of Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495, p. 673; April, 2005, J.K. Dabbs, review of Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, p. 1389; October, 2006, J.K. Dabbs, review of The Cabinet of Eros, p. 288.

MLN, December, 1998, C. Griffith Mann, review of Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, p. 1209.

Renaissance Quarterly, autumn, 1999, Martha Dunkelman, review of Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, p. 877; fall, 2005, Norberto Massi, review of Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, p. 918; spring, 2006, Jill Burke, review of Artists at Court: Image-making and Identity, 1300-1550, p. 243; fall, 2006, Molly Bourne, review of The Cabinet of Eros, p. 862.

Sixteenth Century Journal, summer, 2006, Christopher J. Pastore, review of Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, p. 483.

Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 2006, David Ekserdjian, "Beautiful Meanings," review of The Cabinet of Eros, p. 29.

ONLINE

Johns Hopkins University, Department of the History of Art Web site,http://www.jhu.edu/arthist/ (July 22, 2008), faculty profile of author.