Shelley Perlove

Shelley Perlove, Professor Emerita of the History of Art of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, specializes in Italian and Dutch art of the seventeenth century. Her scholarly interests include art and religious culture in early modern Europe, the Hebrew Bible, material culture, and the visual arts, and visual typology in sixteenth-century art. She is the author of two award-winning books published by Penn State University Press: Bernini and the Idealization of Death, and more recently with Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. She has written more than thirty articles, essays and reviews appearing in such journals as Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux Arts, and Artibus et Historiae and has curated five exhibitions devoted to early modern prints. Most recently she served as consultant to the exhibition, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” which opened at the Louvre. Her current book project investigates the religious works of Rembrandt’s Dutch followers.

Fields of Study

• Dutch art
• Italian Baroque

Presentations

• "Treasures of Early Modern Religious Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts." by special invitation of the Michigan Center of Early Christian Studies, webinar, February 25, 2021.
  
• Keynote: “The Myth of Enoch in Early Modern Visual Art.” Facoltà Teologia, University of Florence, June 12, 2019. 
• “Rembrandt and the Jewish Experience,” for the eponymous exhibition, Telfair Museum, Savannah, Georgia, March 2019.
  
• "Dutch Art of the Golden Age and the Early Photography of Henry Talbot: A Case of Transhistorical Competition," Workshop Presentation in "The Transhistorical Turn in Netherlandish Art History," Historians of Netherlandish Art conference, Ghent, 24 May 2018.

Recent Publications

• Shelley Perlove, "Jacob van Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery, c. 1654-1655: Religious Toleration, Dutch Identity, and Divine Time," in Karl A.E. Enenkel/Walter S. Melion, Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500-1700, (Leiden/Boston/New York, Koninklijke Brill: 2021) Chapter 8, pp. 233-260.
  
• Perlove, Shelley. Stephanie S. Dickey, ed. Rembrandt and his Circle: Insights and Discoveries. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Historians of Netherlandish Art Review, January 2019.
• Charles M. Rosenberg. Rembrandt’s Religious Prints: The Feddersen Collection at the Snite Museum of Art. June 05, 2019. Renaissance Quarterly Review, LXXII, 162-63.

Awards

• President's Award from the Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) for outstanding service and publications