McPHEE, Sarah (Collyer) 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born 1960. Education: Harvard University, A.B. (art history), 1982; Columbia University, M.A., 1988, Ph.D. (art history), 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Art History, Emory University, 128 Carlos Hall, Atlanta, GA 30322. E-mail—smcphee@emory.edu.

CAREER:

Educator and author. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, assistant editor and writer, 1984-86; Emory University, Atlanta, GA, assistant professor, 1995-2001, associate professor of art history, 2001—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James Bowdoin Writing Prize, Harvard University, 1982; Mellon fellow in the humanities, 1986-88, 1992-93; Mellon Foundation grants, 1986, 1988; Metropolitan Museum of Art Jane and Morgan Whitney fellowship, 1993-94, and Chester Dale fellowship, 1994-95; Emory University Faculty Development Awards, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, Title VI grant, 1997, course development grant, 1999, Faculty Research Award, 1999; Massee-Martin grant, 1998; Millard Meiss Subvention grant, 2000, for Bernini and the Bell Towers.

WRITINGS:

(With others) Filippo Juvarra: Drawings from the Roman Period 1704-1714, Part II, Elfante (Rome, Italy), 1999.

Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Filippo Juvarra el'architettura europea, 1998; contributor to periodicals, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Studi Piemontesi, and Burlington. Contributor to exhibition catalogues.

SIDELIGHTS:

With expertise in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italian art and architecture, writer and educator Sarah McPhee illuminates the work of architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his failed efforts to construct the twin bell towers, or campanili, that were to have completed Michelangelo's St. Peter's Basilica in her book Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican.

Beginning his undertaking in 1638, the noted architect and artist was commissioned by Pope Urban VIII due to Bernini's success in numerous other projects throughout Rome. The two massive towers slowly took shape, and by 1643 they had begun to take shape. While the southern tower was almost completed, the northern tower was halted as funds were siphoned from the work to pay for the pope's War of Castro against Italy's powerful Farnese family. While many Vatican wags—including those architects who had been overlooked in favor of the younger Bernini—viewed Bernini's designs as too tall and massive to appropriately grace the top of St. Peter's, work on the project stopped altogether when large cracks appeared in the main Basilica. Bernini's critics were quick to attribute them to the architect's ineptitude and overambitious project. With his reputation now in shambles, Bernini watched as his work was demolished under the orders of succeeding Pope Innocent X. Ironically, his inability to court papal favor following the death of Urban had much to do with the discontinuation of the tower project, as McPhee makes clear; in any case, as Andrew Hopkins noted in the Times Literary Supplement, "From the moment that Bernini's project was dropped, calumnies that have permanently stained his reputation and have persisted for over three centuries began to circulate." With her book, Hopkins added, McPhee provides Bernini vindication.

In what America contributor Franco Mormando dubbed "an awe-inspiring, laudable monument of scholarship," McPhee researched archives and libraries throughout Europe, as well as drawing on her own technical expertise, to sort out the facts of the bell tower fiasco. According to Bernini and the Bell Towersthe damage to the main Basilica was the fault of the project's first architect, Carlo Maderno, who preceded Bernini on the project and began construction of inadequate foundations—St. Peter's is in fact constructed on a flood plain. Pope Urban, too, is not without blame; according to McPhee, his insistence that the towers serve as a fitting monument to his ambition resulted in their bulk, and the unnecessary demolition of the towers was the result of inter-Vatican rivalries and petty jealousies. Noting that Bernini and the Bell Towers is not for the general reader, Mormando praised the work as "the definitive study on this topic," citing her "extremely detailed, technical investigation and closely reasoned analysis of the facts." Hopkins also praised her detailed work, noting that "Architectural historians will appreciate McPhee's close attention to the drawings and her clarification of the roles played in this intriguing saga."