Faculty of Arts School of Culture & Communication

Dr Christopher Marshall

Senior Lecturer in Art History and Museum Studies

Qualifications

PhD (UniMelb); BA (Hons.) (UniMelb)

Biography

Christopher Marshall completed his University of Melbourne PhD dissertation on the Neapolitan Baroque painter Domenico Gargiulo in 1994 before taking up a lectureship at Melbourne University in the following year. Among the many awards he has received are two years funding from the Australian Research Council, Small Grant Award, the Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship, for a period of study at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, a Visiting Senior Lecturing Fellowship at the Department of Art and Art History, Duke University and a Senior Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

His 2001 publication, Macmillan Interpreting Art: A Guide for Students is a standard text for Australian secondary art education and was shortlisted for the 2002 Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing. Further recognitions of Christopher Marshall's curriculum and teaching achievements include a two-time nomination for the Australian Awards for University Teaching (Humanities and the Arts) and the inaugural University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Teaching Award received in 2003.

Christopher Marshall teaches undergraduate units and supervises graduate students in the areas of Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary art; art curatorship, collecting and the art market; and the history and philosophy of museums.

Research strengths

Christopher Marshall has published widely on Neapolitan Baroque art, collecting and the market including Mapping Markets in Europe and the New World (Brepols: 2006); The Art Market in Italy (15th-17th Centuries) (Pannini, 2002); The Journal of the History of Collecting (2000); The Burlington Magazine (2004) and the Art Bulletin (1998). He is also the author of Macmillan Interpreting Art: A Guide for Students (Macmillan, 2001), Macmillan Interpreting Art: Teacher CD-Rom (Macmillan, 2002)and A Deep Sonorous Thing: The Newman College Collection of Art (University of Melbourne, 1993). His current research projects include forthcoming contributions to Making Art History, Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.), Routledge, 2006; The Economic Lives of Italian Baroque Painters, Richard E. Spear and Philip Sohm (eds.), 2006; and three longer-term book-length studies on current issues in museology, another on the marketing, collecting and display of art in seventeenth century Naples and a third on displaying sculpture in museums from the Renaissance to today.

Research projects

Painting and Public in Seventeenth Century Naples

Naples was the second most populous city of Baroque Europe. It was a major Mediterranean trading center forming a vital cultural bridge between the Spanish Habsburgs, the aristocracy, the emerging middle classes and the massed populace who rose to enact a bloody rebellion in 1647. It also nurtured one of the most brilliant manifestations of the Baroque as Caravaggio's late work inspired the likes of Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione and Luca Giordano. Painting and Public aims to present the first ever cultural history of Neapolitan Baroque painting putting the works of these and other artists into a broader context. It will examine the period from the point of view of how its artists and publics dynamically interacted in order to form a complex and mutually inter-dependent art world. The landscape that  it will reveal is one where artists struggled constantly to position themselves advantageously in an over-stocked pool of talent and where private and public patrons collectors alike were able to draw on an increasing range of options for acquiring works -as much from shrewdly business-oriented dealers, for example, as through direct negotiations with artists themselves.

The Economic Lives of Italian Baroque Painters

Collaborators

Richard E. Spear (University of Maryland), Philip Sohm (University of Toronto), Peter Lukehart (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Renata Ago, University of Rome, La Sapienza, Elena Fumagalli, University of Naples II, Raffaella Morselli, University of Teramo.

Brief Description

Most studies of the economics of 17th century painting have focused on patronage (especially in Italy) and market mechanisms (Northern Europe) at the expense of the artists themselves. Economic Lives takes painters as producers, marketers and self-promoters and asks how they earned their incomes, including secondary earnings from dealings and investments; what their pricing and marketing strategies were and, most importantly, what their socio-economic status was in relation to craftsmen, musicians, lawyers etc. By underscoring the importance of economic factors in making, selling, and displaying art Economic Lives wishes to shed further light on the professional realities of art making in the Baroque period and about the community and social life of artists, as well as the formation of taste in the period.

The Times and Spaces of Sculpture in the Museum

Collaborators

The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

This project considers the changing functions and associations of sculpture in the museum from the Renaissance to today. Sculpture has long enjoyed a prominent position in museums. Pope Sixtus IV's bequest of a sculpture collection to the people of Rome in 1471 formed the nucleus of the Capitoline Museum and sculpture played an equally fundamental role in the institution of Pope Julius II's Vatican Belvedere courtyard together with the countless private and public art collections that it helped to inspire. Sculpture in the Museum focuses on these and subsequent examples of high-profile sculpture initiatives instigated in museums as a means of promoting the institutions' wider aspirations and ideals. Work on the project commenced in late 2005 thanks to a Senior Fellowship awarded by the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. This Fellowship A conference is planned for 2007 on this topic, to be hosted by the Henry Moore Institute, which will form the basis, in turn, for an edited book, the development of further research modules and the publication of an eventual monograph on the topic.

Research students supervision

PhD

Master of Arts (Research)

Master of Arts (Curatorship)

Recent presentations (from 2002)

Recent grants and awards

Publications

Books

Book chapters (from 2002)

Journal articles (from 2002)

Other publications (from 2002)

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