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Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art; patronage and collecting; art theory and criticism

Degrees

PhD 1985, Brown University

Additional Information

Pamela Jones is a specialist in Italian art of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular interests in art and religious culture, the reception of art, patronage and collecting, and art theory and criticism.  She has received grants from such organizations as the Kress Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the author of the book Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (Cambridge University Press, 1993; Italian translation by Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1997), and co-edited the volume From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550-1650 with Thomas Worcester (E.J. Brill, 2002).  Jones has also co-curated two exhibitions that examined old master paintings in their original stylistic, religious, and social contexts:  Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1999) and Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500 to 1800 (Worcester Art Museum, 2005).  Jones’s book Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni was published by Ashgate in 2008.  Her latest book, an edited edition of two seventeenth-century art treatises by Federico Borromeo, was published in 2010 in Harvard University Press’s series The I Tatti Renaissance Library.  The book’s title is Federico Borromeo ‘Sacred Painting’ ‘Museum’;  Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr. translated the treatises from Latin to English and Jones wrote the Introduction and notes.  Jones is currently working on art and the cult of St. Teresa of Avila in Rome during the seventeenth century.

In 1995, Jones was inducted into the Accademia di S. Carlo in Milan.  She has recently served on the Program Committee and Gordon Prize Committee of the Renaissance Society of America, and is currently Field Editor for Early Modern and Southern European Art for CAA Reviews.