Ut Pictura Poesis (“As in Painting, So in Poetry”) - Horace, Ars Poetica (1st c. B.C.E.)
April Oettinger
ProfessorArt History
April Oettinger is Professor of Art History at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Since completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, she has taught at the University of Delaware, the University of Hartford, and for the Colgate University Study Abroad Program in Venice. Her recent publications, which have appeared in scholarly journals including Artibus et Historiae, The Journal of Word and Image, and Source, treat topics including the art of 16th-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, the 1499 edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and Michelangelo’s snowman, among the artist’s most famous ‘lost’ masterpieces. She is co-editor, along with Karen Hope Goodchild and Leopoldine Prosperetti, of Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy. Art and the Verdant Earth, forthcoming in May 2019 from Amsterdam University Press. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship and the Dame Francis Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, and more recently, grants from the Delmas Foundation, the Renaissance Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and a Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery have supported her current book project, Animating Nature. Lorenzo Lotto and the Sublime Turn in 16th-Century Venetian Landscape Art, 1500-1550.
Research, Scholarship, Creative Work in Progress
Forthcoming Publications
Animating Nature. Lorenzo Lotto and the Sublime Turn in Venetian Landscape Art [Manuscript in preparation]
Green Worlds In Early Modern Italy. Art and the Verdant Earth. Eds. K. Goodchild, A. Oettinger, P. Prosperetti. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
"Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto's 1509 St. Jerome," in Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy. Art and the Verdant Earth. Eds. K. Goodchild, A. Oettinger, P. Prosperetti. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
Publications
John C. McLucas, Leslie Morgan, April Oettinger, Eds., Ariosto 500, in Modern Language Notes, 133.1 (January 2018).
Source: Notes in the History Of Art, 36, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 2017). A double volume dedicated to Paul Barolsky (Commonwealth Professor of Art History, University of Virginia). Eds. April Oettinger & Karen Goodchild.
“Laughter in Paradise and the Spirit of Jest in Lorenzo Lotto’s Santo Spirito Altarpiece,” Source: Notes in the History Of Art, 36, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 2017): 168-177.
“Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid” Receptions of Antiquity and Constructions of Gender in Renaissance Art, ed. Alison Poe and Marice Rose (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 230-263.
“The Lizard in the Study: Landscape and Otium in Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530),” Artibus et Historiae, 65.33 (2012): 115-125.
“The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance Romance,” The Journal of Word and Image, 27.1 (2011): 15-30.
“Aby Warburg’s Nymph and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: An Episode in the Afterlife of a Renaissance Romance,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 32:2 (2006): 225-246.
“Michelangelo’s Snowman and the Art of Snow in Vasari’s Lives,” in Reading Vasari. Ed. Anne Barriault, Andrew Ladis, Norman Land, Jeryldene Wood. Athens, Ga: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005. pp. 203-211.
“An Introduction to the Dreamer and the Dream in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” in Miscellanea Marciana. Vol. XIV (2001): 31-46.
Exhibits or Performances
Exhibitions
Paradise Imagined: The Ideal Landscape in the Christian and Islamic World (June 23-September 30, 2012) *co-curated with Dr. Amy Landau, Assistant Curator of Islamic Art and Manuscripts, Walters Art Museum (Wall Street Journal Review: “Heaven on Earth”)
Visual Education: Selections from the Collections of Goucher College and Sidney and Jean Flah Silber ’54, Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College, September 12 – October 18, 2009. *co-curated with Dr. Gail Husch, Associate Professor, Art History
External Awards, Honors, Grants
2019 Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellowship. Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
2018 Gladys Krieble Delmas Research Fellowship. Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Program
2016 Summer Stipend. National Endowment for the Humanities
2015 Franklin Research Grant. American Philosophical Society
2014 Gladys Krieble Delmas Research Fellowship. Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Program
2012 Renaissance Society of America Research Grant, Renaissance Society of America
2002 Gladys Krieble Delmas Research Fellowship, Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Program
2001 Dame Francis Yates Fellowship, Warburg Institute, University of London, UK William Morris Foundation Fellowship
1999 Fulbright Fellowship, Italian Fulbright Commission
Conference Papers & Panel Participation
2018 “Writing the Land in 16th-Century Italy: Landscape Painting, Poetic Landscapes,
and the Early Modern Naturalists”
Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA
2016 “Of Trees and Transformation in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1509 St. Jerome,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Boston, MA
2014 “Arboreal Exegesis and Forests of Devotion in Lorenzo Lotto’s Designs for the Choir of Santa Maria Maggiore”. Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, New York, NY
2012 “Viticulture, Vision, and Play in Lorenzo Lotto’s Frescos in the Oratorio Suardi at Trescore”, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.
2010 “A Lizard in the Study: Landscape and the Vita Solitaria in Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1530 (Venice, Accademia)”. Contribution of a group of panels in honor of Patricia Fortini Brown, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Venice, Italy
2006 “Ekphrasis, Imagination, and the Ideal Palace Interior in 15th-Century Italy.” Contribution to a group of panels that explored “The Early Modern House.” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA
News
- February 13, 2019
Professor April Oettinger has been appointed a Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.