Denise Allen, "A Catalogue for 2020: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes at The Met"

Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 6:00pm

Series: The Cook Lecture

Speaker: Denise Allen, Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Title: A Catalogue for 2020: Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes at The Met

Description: In 1908, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the first American institution to begin collecting small-scale Italian bronzes. Today the Museum has almost three hundred works reflecting changing taste and the desire to build a comprehensive holding. The collection, among the largest in the United States, comprises a fascinatingly diverse, often mysterious assemblage of largely understudied works ranging in date from around 1450 to 1800.

Cataloguing The Met’s collection began in the early 2000s when an international team of authors was challenged to expand the traditional focus on attribution, dating, and quality by giving equal emphasis to scientific examination, the process of making, issues of patronage, the object’s social context, the art market, and the history of collecting. Nearing completion, the catalogue of Italian bronzes at the Met promises to narrate the story of small-scale bronze sculpture as a frequent locus for monumental ideas and intimate meanings that spoke to elite and middle-class audiences across Renaissance and Baroque Europe.

This lecture will present some of the highlights of our investigations – the discoveries made, the attributions changed, and the surprising knowledge gained by cataloguing even the most humble bronzes. It will consider how vital international collaboration among curators, academics, conservators, scientists, dealers, and collectors has become to the advancement of this specialized field. And most of all, it will offer some suggestions on how in 2020 Italian Renaissance and Baroque bronzes might speak to diverse audiences and open new doors that connect these works with contemporary social issues.

Denise Allen, Curator, joined the staff of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. She currently is leading the project dedicated to cataloguing The Met’s collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. In 2017 she co-curated the installation “Rodin at The Met,” celebrating the centenary of the sculptor's death. Her area of specialty is Italian Renaissance sculpture, with a focus on the work of Benvenuto Cellini. As a curator at The Frick Collection (2003–2014), she curated six exhibitions devoted to the art of the bronze statuette, including: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection (2014), Antico (2012), Andrea Riccio (2008), and European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection (2004). She was the associate curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1995–2002). She received her MA from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1984 and B.A from Wellesley College in 1979.