Sheila Barker

Sheila Barker graduated from Amherst College in 1993 and completed her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph. D. at Columbia University with a specialization in Italian Baroque painting. She has extensive teaching experience (Barnard College, The College of St. Rose, and The American University of Rome); she has managed a private Old Master art gallery; and she has worked in the curatorial department of the Indianapolis Museum of Art as the Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow. She was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2005, and she was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at The Medici Archive Project from 2005-2007 and a Medici Archive Project Fellow in 2007-2008. Her publications have investigated the impact of plagues upon art and society in Baroque Rome; the evolution of Saint Sebastian's cult and iconography; theories of disease in relation to the art of Nicholas Poussin; the historical reception of Pope Urban VIII; the documentation on women artists in the Uffizi Historical Archives; 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:

“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

“Christine de Lorraine and Medicine at the Medici Court.” For an anthology of essays on Medici Women edited by Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown. Toronto: The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming

“Irene Parenti Duclos’s Copy of the Madonna del Sacco: Politics and Perfect Painting,” in The Madonna del Sacco by Irene Duclos, eds. Jane Fortune and Linda Falcone. Florence: The Florentine Press, forthcoming [2011]

“Malaria and the Search for Its Cure in Granducal Tuscany,” in Medicea. Rivista
interdisciplinare di studi medicei, no.5 (Feb. 2010): 54-9

 “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 & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 69-89

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

“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:

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

 “Pearls, Prunes, and Malaria: Behind the Scenes of Bronzino’s Double Portrait of Eleonora de Toledo and Giovanni de’ Medici,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 16 April 2010

“Gendered Reception Theory: Art and Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Society of America Conference, Venice, Italy 2010

 “Women Painters at work in the Florentine Galleries 1774-1857,” Guest Lecture, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Florence Chapter, The British Library, Florence, 2008

 “Women’s Medical Authority in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” for the panel, “Women’s Authority in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Society of America Conference, Chicago, 2008

 “The Plague of 1656 and Roman Art and Architecture,” Methodology in Art History, Guest Lectures, Department of Art History, Trinity College, Dublin, 2007