Biography

Marc Gotlieb is Halvorsen Director of the Williams-Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art.  He has also taught at Emory University and the University of Toronto. A past editor-in-chief of the Art Bulletin, his scholarship encompasses French Romantic art, the image of the Old Masters in the nineteenth-century, academic art, and Orientalism. Imitation is Suicide: Teacher Student Disasters in Nineteenth-Century Art, will be published in Fall 2026 by Princeton University Press.

Project Summary

At I Tatti this fall, Marc will be researching nineteenth-century accounts of the deaths of Renaissance artists, including Raphael, Marieta Robusti (“La Tintoretta,”) and Leonardo da Vinci. The lives of Renaissance artists, as recounted by Vasari and other early sources, saw wide interest in nineteenth-century visual culture. Their deaths in particular offered Romantic artists a richly imaginative template to think through the most intimate aspects of their own enterprise. Marc is also preparing to study the painting and sculpture of French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, particularly as they engage issues of spectatorship and the viewer.