Thomas Willette | University of Michigan (original) (raw)

Thomas Willette

Thomas Willette taught most years since 1992 at the University of Michigan prior to his retirement in 2022. He is the co-author, with Sebastian Schütze, of Massimo Stanzione (Electa Napoli, 1992) and the co-editor, with Janis Bell, of Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is the co-editor, with Marcia Hall, of Naples (Cambridge University Press, 2017) a volume in the Cambridge University Press series “Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance.” He has published numerous essays on Neapolitan painting and on the historiography of Italian art from Vasari to Benedetto Croce, including a series of revisionist studies on the eighteenth-century biographer Bernardo De Dominici, inaugurated in the 1986 volume of Ricerche sul’600 napoletano. His essay on the Naples edition of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting appeared in Re-Reading Leonardo: the Treatise on Painting Across Europe, ed. Claire Farago (Ashgate, 2009). He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for his current research on the 18th-century reception of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, a book first published in Naples in 1730.
Phone: home (734) 662-8687
Address: Department of the History of Art
University of Michigan
Tappan Hall 110
855 South University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1357
USA

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Papers by Thomas Willette

Re-Reading Leonardo: The 'Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, ed. Claire Farago, Ashgate Publishing, pp. 147-171, 2009

Parthenope’s Splendor: Art of the Golden Age in Naples (Papers in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University, Vol. VII), ed. Jeanne Chenault Porter and Susan Scott Munshower, University Park, PA, pp. 230-248., 1993

Author's follow-up note: It must be pointed out that the animal held by the woman in the painting... more Author's follow-up note: It must be pointed out that the animal held by the woman in the painting by Massimo Stanzione is not a cock but a hen. However, having admitted this error, I will say that the essay is not entirely without relevance to the corpus of Seicento visual art and poetry that mocks the artificiality of Cinquecento court culture.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1999

This article examines the centennial commemoration of the Repubblica napoletana of 1799 with a vi... more This article examines the centennial commemoration of the Repubblica napoletana of 1799 with a view to understanding how the historical events and their

The Journal of Modern History, 1995

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1996

With some self-discipline and self-observation we can all find out for ourselves that what we cal... more With some self-discipline and self-observation we can all find out for ourselves that what we call seeing is invariably coloured and shaped by our knowledge (or belief) of what we see. EH Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. Princeton, 1961, 394. The documents, as is so often ...

Sixteenth Century Journal, 1993

Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2004

... L'idea del bello: viaggio per Roma nel ... arrangement and beautiful engravings, eve... more ... L'idea del bello: viaggio per Roma nel ... arrangement and beautiful engravings, even as they acknowledged that it contained few archaeological discoveries. Dwyer reveals that Bellori also apparently made sev-eral additions to the iconographical corpus in order to curry favour ...