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David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University.

Career

Born in South Africa, David A. Freedberg received his B.A. from Yale University in 1969 and his D.Phil. at Oxford University in 1973, where he attended Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar. He was a lecturer at Westfield College at the University of London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art before moving to Columbia in 1984. In addition to his chair at Columbia, Freedberg has been the Baldwin Professor at Oberlin College, the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art, and, most recently, the Nat C. Robertson Professor of Science and Society at Emory University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Accademia Nazionale di Agricultura.

Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. He first investigated this topic in Iconoclasts and their Motives, 1984, which was followed by the landmark book, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989 and in several subsequent editions in many languages.

Freedberg's more traditional art historical writing originally centered on the fields of Dutch and Flemish art. Within these fields he specialized in the history of Dutch printmaking (Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century, 1980), and in the paintings and drawings of Bruegel and Rubens (The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1989, and Rubens: The Life of Christ after the Passion, 1984). Freedberg then turned his attention to seventeenth-century Roman art and to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, before moving on to his recent work in the history of science and on the importance of the new cognitive neurosciences for the study of art and its history. He has also been involved in several exhibitions of contemporary art (e.g., Joseph Kosuth: The Play of the Unmentionable, 1992). Following a series of important discoveries in Windsor Castle, the Institut de France and the archives of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, he has for some time been concerned with the intersection of art and science in the age of Galileo. While much of his work in this area has been published in articles and catalogues, his chief publication in this area is The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History, 2002.

Freedberg is now devoting a substantial portion of his attention to collaborations with neuroscientists working in fields of vision, movement and emotion. "Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience," an essay co-authored with the physiologist Vittorio Gallese, recentl;y appeared in "Trends in Cognitive Sciences" 11 (2007), pp. 197-203.

Publications

Fungi: The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Natural History Series, II. 3 vols. London: the Royal Collection in association with Harvey Miller, 2005. (With David Pegler.)

The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Citrus Fruit: The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Natural History Series, I. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1997. (With Enrico Baldini.)

Art History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture. Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1992.

Joseph Kosuth: The Play of the Unmentionable. New York: The New Press, 1992.

The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Tokyo: The Tokyo Shimbun, 1989.

The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

In addition to his own publications, Freedberg serves on the boards of several academic and professional journals, including the Journal of Neuroesthetics (London), Nuncius (Florence), Arts and Neurosciences (Paris), and the Italian Review.

External links

• David Freedberg's web page at Columbia University
• The Italian Academy at Columbia University
• David Freedberg's lecture "Action, Empathy, and Emotion in the History of Art" at the New York Academy of Sciences

• Living people
• American art historians
• Columbia University faculty
• Academics of the Courtauld Institute of Art