In honour of Deborah Howard's recent election as an Honorary Patron Member of the SAHGB, the Society is pleased to present her in a conversazione with Andrew Hopkins.
In honour of Deborah Howard's recent election as an Honorary Patron Member of the SAHGB, the Society is pleased to present a conversazione with Andrew Hopkins.
Deborah Howard is Professor Emerita of Architectural History at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St John’s College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. A graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and of the Courtauld Institute of Art, she taught at University College London, the University of Edinburgh and the Courtauld, before returning to Cambridge in 1992. There she was Head of the History of Art Department for six years before retiring in 2013. From 1997 to 1999 she was Chair of the SAHGB.
Deborah is well known for her work on the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto. Her books on Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (1975), The Architectural History of Venice (1980, 1987 and, revised and enlarged, 2002), and on Venice and the East: the Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1100-1500 (2000) have established her as a major presence in the field. She has also written a monograph on Scottish Architecture from the Reformation to the Restoration 1560-1660 (1995). Her innovative study, with Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (2009) was followed by the architectural biography Venice Disputed: Marc’Antonio Barbaro and Venetian Architecture 1550-1600 (2012). On her retirement, her immense contribution was recognised by two festschrift volumes, edited by Nebahat Avcıoǧlu, Emma Jones, and Allison Sherman (2016-2018). Following retirement, she has continued with her research, receiving an ERC Synergy Grant, with Mary Laven and Abigail Brundin, which led to the co-authored book, The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy (2018), and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to investigate Technological Invention and Architecture in the Veneto in the Early Modern Period. The book of this project, Proto-Industrial Architecture in the Veneto in the Age of Palladio, is in press.
Andrew Hopkins is an architectural historian and professor at the University of L'Aquila, Italy, specialising in the history and historiography of Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Italy. He is winner, in 1996, of the Society's Hawksmoor Essay Medal. His PhD on Baldassare Longhena and Sta Maria della Salute, Venice, written at the Courtauld Institute of Art, was supervised (from Cambridge) by Deborah Howard. He is the author of several volumes and contributed essays to Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and Its Territories, 1450–1750: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard (2013) and The Image of Venice: Fialetti’s View and Sir Henry Wotton, edited by Deborah Howard and Henrietta McBurney (2014).
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