A note on how this wonderful volume originated. In October 2024, the Department of Art History of Rutgers University held a study day to honor Catherine Puglisi as mentor, teacher and friend to numerous students. Patricia Zalamea organized the event that comprised eleven of Catherine’s former doctoral students presenting talks celebrating her. Laura Weigert, chair of the department, opened the occasion listing and praising many of Catherine’s achievements, and Babette Bohn closed the day with a stimulating keynote address included here in a slightly revised version. Judged a success, the event led naturally to the thought of a publication. Józef Grabski graciously and generously agreed to publish the papers if several of Catherine’s colleagues in the US and Europe enriched the volume with additional essays. We are all – Catherine in primis – grateful to Józef for his gift and more than appreciative of the hard work that Joanna Wolańska and her staff in Cracow undertook to produce this beautiful volume.

Catherine attended Harvard University where she majored in History and Literature while studying Art History with James Ackerman, Sydney Freedberg, and Herni Zerner. She then chose to pursue an Art History Master’s degree at University College, London, where she studied with David Davies, David Freedberg, and Deborah Howard. Upon returning to the United States, she entered the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), New York University, furthering her interests in Italian art but shifting from Renaissance studies to the seventeenth century and working with Donald Posner. When Catherine arrived at the Institute, the study of Baroque art was at its height: Jonathan Brown offering courses in Spanish art and Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann in Dutch painting. Catherine studied with both scholars.

She wrote her dissertation as a catalogue raisonné of the work of the Bolognese painter Francesco Albani, which Yale University Press published in 1999. In the previous year her book on Caravaggio was issued by Phaidon; it has since appeared in French, Italian and Chinese editions. Her studies and publications in the new century have concentrated on those two painters but on others as well, especially in the Venetian, Roman and Bolognese Schools, with particular attention to close study of the work of art, religious iconography, patronage and collecting and artistic practice. In 2019, she published Art and Faith in the Venetian World: Venerating Christ as the Man of Sorrows in collaboration with William Barcham. It was preceded by their co-curated exhibition, Passion in Venice (New York, Museum of Biblical Art, 2011), for which Rutgers graduate students wrote many of the catalogue entries.

Catherine has received major grants, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy, Rome; the J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a Residential Fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy); and Research Grants from the Delmas Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

As well as organizing numerous symposia and conference panels at the College Art Association and the Renaissance Society of America, Catherine has lectured widely in the US and abroad. In 2019, she delivered in French a series of invited lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, on ‘Les Changements de style radicaux dans la peinture baroque’, the subject of her current book project. Catherine has been interviewed on WNYC, the BBC, and French television.

Beginning her teaching career at the University of Pittsburgh, Catherine joined the Rutgers faculty in 1990 where she taught until 2023 when she retired as professor emerita. Her many courses included introductory surveys and undergraduate and graduate seminars on Italian and Spanish Baroque art. Additionally, she taught at the Rutgers Study Abroad programs in Florence and Paris and was a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht in 2016. Rutgers University bestowed upon Catherine its School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contribution to Undergraduate Education, and most recently, she received a Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the university.

Catherine served as chair of the Department of Art History for six years and was also director of graduate studies, a role she enjoyed as it offered her the possibility to mentor graduate students for many years. During her years at Rutgers, she supervised fourteen doctoral dissertations, oversaw dozens of Master’s theses and sat on numerous dissertation committees.

Most importantly, Catherine’s generous disposition and meticulous attention to detail characterized both her teaching and advising. To see works of art with her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she often took her seminars, or to meet her in Venice or Paris and visit museums there was a pleasure and an inspiring experience for those of us fortunate to have been on the spot during research trips. Catherine belongs to a generation of art historians who learnt how to do close looking in ways that are hard to achieve today. Her breadth of knowledge and ability to engage with a wide range of topics across regions and methodologies are reflected in the diversity of dissertations that she oversaw – from French Renaissance art to Spanish Baroque painting and, of course, topics on Caravaggio – and in the rich conversations that she has had with each one of us over the years. The deep regard with which Catherine is held is reflected not only in her students’ appreciation and affection for her but also in the number of colleagues who generously gave their time and expertise to contribute to this volume in her honor.

Lisandra Estevez and Patricia Zalamea