Sheila Barker

Sheila Barker graduated from Amherst College in 1993 and completed an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph. D. at Columbia University with a specialization in Italian Baroque painting and a doctoral dissertation on plague art in 17th-century Rome. In addition to teaching art history for many years (currently for the University of California EAP in Florence) and managing an Old Masters gallery (Robert Simon Fine Arts), she has also worked in a museum as the Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2003-4. Her research fellowships include a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2005; a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at The Medici Archive Project from 2005-2007, and a Medici Archive Project Fellowship in 2007-2008. From 2011 to 2012 she was on the editorial staff of the journal Medicina e Storia. Her publications have dealt with plague art in Baroque Rome; Saint Sebastian's iconography; the art of Nicholas Poussin; Pope Urban VIII; women artists in Florence; women and medicine; and the early history of the antimalarial drug quinine. Her forthcoming book on the career of Gian Lorenzo Bernini views the artist exclusively through the lens of contemporary journalistic reports that she found in the Medici Granducal Archive.
 
Selected Publications:

“Christine de Lorraine and Medicine at the Medici Court,” in Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Gran Ducal Tuscany, ed. Judith C. Brown and Giovanna Benadusi. Toronto: The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming [2012].

“The Emergence of the Public Figure of the Woman Artist in Florence, 1770-1860,” in Women, Femininity, and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914, ed. Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen. Forthcoming.

 “Medical Culture and the Women of the Medici Granducal Court,” in The Medici and Their Archive. Power and Representation in Early Modern Tuscany, ed. Alessio Assonitis and Brian Sandberg. Rome: Viella, forthcoming [2012].

“Irene Parenti Duclos’s Copy of the Madonna del Sacco: Politics and Perfect Painting,” in Jane Fortune, Sheila Barker, Susanna Bracci and Annarita Caputo, Irene Parenti Duclos. A Work Restored, an Artist Revealed. Florence: The Florentine Press, 2011, pp. 25-41.

“News about Bernini at the Medici Court: An Avviso Account of the Four Rivers Fountain,” in Medicea. Rivista interdisciplinare di studi medicei, no.7 (Oct. 2010): 6-15.

“Pasquinades and Propaganda: The Reception of Urban VIII,” in The Papacy since 1500: from Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, ed. Thomas Worcester, S.J., and  James Corkery, S.J.  Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 69-89.

“Women Painters at Work in the Uffizi,” in Jane Fortune, Invisible Women. Forgotten Artists of Florence. Florence: The Florentine Press, 2009, pp.110-116.
       
Selected Confererences & Lectures:

“Flowers of Health: Phytopharmacy at the Medici Court,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 2012.

“Artemisia Gentileschi’s Tumultuous Florentine Years,” The Jane Fortune Conference, “Women Artists of Early Modern Italy / Artiste nell’Italia dell’età moderna,” Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Florence, 2012.

 “Early Modern Italy’s Other Women Artists,” Second Annual Feminist Art History Conference, The American University, Washington DC, 2011.

 “La copia della Madonna del Sacco di Irene Parenti Duclos: politica e perfezione pittorica,” for the conference “Irene Parenti Duclos. Un’opera restaurata, un’artista rivelata,” Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, 2011.

 “Caravaggio, Artemesia, Bernini: New Discoveries on Baroque Art at the Medici Archive Project,” Guest Lecture, The British Library, Florence, Italy, 2011.

“Pearls, Prunes, and Malaria: Behind the Scenes of Bronzino’s Double Portrait of Eleonora de Toledo and Giovanni de’ Medici, ” Special Lecture Series: Bronzino at the Court of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 April 2010.