Marcia Hall, who usually publishes as Marcia B. Hall, is an American art historian, who is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art at the

Tyler School of Art and Architecture The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptists, Baptist minister Russell Conwell an ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

. Hall's scholarship has concentrated on

Italian Renaissance painting Italian Renaissance painting is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring in the Italian Peninsula, which was at that time divided into many political stat ...

, mostly of the sixteenth century, and especially

Raphael Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, better known as Raphael (; or ; March 28 or April 6, 1483April 6, 1520), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual ...

and

Michelangelo Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was in ...

Biography

Marcia Brown was born in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

in 1939 to Charles Edward Brown (1894–1949), a business executive, and Frances Peebles (later Ocheltree) (1901–1991). Sorensen, Lee, ed
"Hall, Marcia B."
''Dictionary of Art Historians''. 11 August 2021. She attended

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficia ...

, graduating in 1960. In 1961 she married Charles Arthur Mann Hall (1924–1990), then the Dean of Wellesley's Chapel. She earned an MA from

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

in 1962 and won a

Fulbright Fellowship The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

in 1963 to research her dissertation on the renovations in the late 16th century to

Santa Maria Novella Santa Maria Novella is a church in Florence, Italy, situated opposite, and lending its name to, the city's main railway station. Chronologically, it is the first great basilica in Florence, and is the city's principal Dominican church. The ch ...

and Santa Croce, supervised by

Sydney Joseph Freedberg Sydney Joseph Freedberg (November 11, 1914 – May 6, 1997) was an American art historian and curator, mainly of Italian Renaissance painting. Freedberg was born in Boston and attended the Boston Latin School. He graduated from Harvard College in ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. She is also the first scholar to discover the

rood screen The rood screen (also choir screen, chancel screen, or jubé) is a common feature in late medieval church architecture. It is typically an ornate partition between the chancel and nave, of more or less open tracery constructed of wood, stone, ...

in both churches once removed by

Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari (, also , ; 30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian Renaissance Master, who worked as a painter, architect, engineer, writer, and historian, who is best known for his work '' The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculp ...

during the Counter-Reformation. She earned her PhD from Harvard in 1967. She has been teaching art history class relates to Italian Renaissance at Temple University since 1973. Her visiting fellowships include the

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

(1987–1988), and twice at

I Tatti Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It houses a collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and ...

, Florence.

Works

* 1979. ''Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, 1565–77''. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. *1990. ''After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century''. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. * 1992. ''Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting''. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. *2002. ''Michelangelo. The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel''. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. *2011. ''The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio''. London and New York: Yale University Press. *2019. ''The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting''. New Haven: Yale University Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hall, Marcia American art historians Temple University faculty Wellesley College alumni Radcliffe College alumni Harvard University alumni 1939 births People from Washington, D.C. Women art historians Living people