Celeste Brusati

Celeste Brusati is professor emerita of the history of art, and holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Her scholarship centers on European art and art literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a focus on the pictorial arts in the Netherlands. Much of her work deals with problems of pictorial representation and perception, visual and literary reflections on art in the Netherlands, and the role of pictorial images in the making of seventeenth century Dutch culture. She is the author of Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1995) and Johannes Vermeer (1993) and has written on still life, self-imagery, perspective, trompe l’oeil illusionism, and value. In 2012 she curated Flip your Field: 20th Century Abstract Prints from the Collection at the UM Museum of Art. Current projects include editing the first English translation of Samuel van Hoogstraten's painting treatise, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst of 1678, to be published by the Getty Research Institute. She is also writing a book, provisionally titled Seeing in Pictures: Paradox and Paradigm in Dutch Art, which considers the artistic and theoretical implications of Dutch still life and genre paintings that reflect on the paradoxes of art and visual perception.

Affiliation(s)

• Department of Women’s Studies
• Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design
• Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Field(s) of Study

• Early modern European art, primarily in the Netherlands
• Early modern art literature and image theory
• Pictorial representation and perception
• Art, science, and technology