Svetlana calpers michael baxandall biography

American art historian

Svetlana Leontief Alpers (néeLeontief; born February 10, 1936^[1]) is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic.^[2] Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing.^[3] She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.^[4]

Education and career

Svetlana Alpers received her B.A.

from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a Ph.D.from Harvard in 1965.^[1] She was a professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley from 1962 to 1998, and by 1994 she was named Professor Emerita.^[1]

In 1983, Alpers co-founded the interdisciplinary journalRepresentations with American literary critic Stephen Greenblatt.^[5]

In 2007, she collaborated with artists James Hyde and Barney Kulok on a project entitled Painting Then for Now.

The project consists of 1