Home > Faculty, Students & Staff : Steven F. Ostrow

Steven F. Ostrow

Professor
Chair

Office: 338 Heller Hall

Office Hours - Fall 2008

Mon: 1:00 - 3:00
and by appointment

Phone: (612) 626-2878
Fax: (612) 626-8679

E-mail: ostro133@tc.umn.edu

Steven F. Ostrow (Ph.D., Princeton, 1987) specializes in early-modern Italian (especially Roman) visual culture, with an emphasis on the post-Tridentine period and seventeenth-century sculpture. He has published on a diverse range of subjects, from late-sixteenth-century tomb sculpture to early-eighteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, engaging issues concerned with patronage, iconography, and historicism; art theory and artistic practices; the interplay among art, politics, science, and religion; and the literary construction of artists’ biographies. His current research focuses on the art theory and biography of Gianlorenzo Bernini.

After teaching at Vassar College and the University of California, Riverside, in 2006 he assumed the chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. The recipient of a NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art at the American Academy in Rome, a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, D.C.), and an Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei Fellowship (Rome), his publications include: Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays, with Maarten Delbeke and Evonne Levy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); “The Discourse of Failure in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Propsero Bresciano’s Moses,” Art Bulletin, 87 (2006): 267-91; “The Counter-Reformation and the End of the Century,” in Rome: Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance, M. Hall, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 246-320; “Playing with the Paragone: The Reliefs of Pietro Bernini,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 67 (2004): 329-64; “Isaac Laughing: Caravaggio, Non-Traditional Imagery, and Traditional Identification,” with Conrad Rudolph, Art History, 24 (2001): 646-81; “Paolo Sanquirico: A Forgotten Virtuoso of Seicento Rome,” Storia dell’arte, 92 (1998): 27-59; Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, with Luisa Ciammitti and Salvatore Settis (Getty Research Institute, 1998); “Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon: Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome,” Art Bulletin, 78 (1996): 218-35; Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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