Jaynie Anderson
Jaynie Louise Anderson FAHA, OSI is an Australian art historian, writer and curator of exhibitions, who is renowned for her publications and exhibitions on Giorgione and Venetian painting. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. Anderson has been Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1997 until 2014, and was President of International Committee of the History of Art from 2008 to 2012.
Biography
Jaynie Anderson was born in Melbourne, the daughter of Keith Anderson, a medical practitioner, and of Bonnie Surridge, a pianist. Her schooling took place at St Michael’s Grammar School, St Kilda, and at the Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School. Her portrait, aged 18 by Reshid Bey, is in the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.Academic career
Anderson has had a long career both internationally and within Australia. At the University of Melbourne she studied History and Fine Arts. In 1967 Charles Mitchell, invited her to Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, to begin work on a doctoral dissertation on Venetian Renaissance painting. In 1970 she was elected the first woman Rhodes Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, at a period when Rhodes Scholarships were unavailable to women. There she competed her doctorate on Giorgione, and remained as a lecturer in art history at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, from 1975 to 1996.In 1997 Jaynie Anderson was appointed Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, a post she held until 2014. Her monograph on Giorgione remains the most authoritative study of the artist. She engaged in many research projects, but most notably the convening of the international congress in art history at the University of Melbourne in January 2008, Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration and Convergence, a theme of Australian significance that has become increasingly one of international importance. The conference was published the following year with contributions from 220 authors. Described as the biennale of art history, the participants investigate the state of the discipline across the world. Contemporary Indigenous Australian art proudly took its place as part of the international discourse on art history. Hans Belting described the conference as having ‘changed the history of art history forever’.
In 2008 Anderson was elected president of the International Committee of the History of Art, in which role she developed global art history until 2012. The composition of the board of CIHA was changed to represent all continents. Under her leadership CIHA congresses were planned for Nuremberg and Beijing.
In 2009 she was appointed Foundation Director of the Australian Institute of Art History, an initiative that sprang from the success of the Melbourne CIHA congress in 2008, Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration and Convergence, published in 2009.
Anderson has been a visiting fellow at distinguished institutions for research projects beginning with British Academy Grants to study Giovanni Morelli in Italy and Germany in 1982. In 1996 Anderson was invited to the J. Paul Getty Museum on a fellowship, to write about the early connoisseurship of Italian painting. She has been several times a Visiting Professor at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies, and at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art Washington, and was the Inaugural Visiting Professor at INHA, Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, 2003.
Anderson’s most important publication is Giorgione. The Painter of Poetic Brevity, Paris/New York, 1996/1997, where she presents novel archival and visual material from conservation in a critical definition of his career.
Anderson is the editor of the standard edition of Giovanni Morelli’s writings and editor of a number of his unpublished writings, transcribed from Italian manuscripts.
In 2015 she received an Italian knighthood from the President of the Republic of Italy, the only art historian to have been awarded the Order of the Star of Italy, for her outstanding contribution to the
study of Venetian art history, especially Giorgione.
Writings
- Giorgione: The Painter of Poetic Brevity, Paris/New York, 1997.
- Collecting, Connoisseurship and the Art Market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni Morelli’s Letters to Giovanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt , Venice, Istituto Veneto, 1999.
- Tiepolo's Cleopatra, Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence. The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2009.
- The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, Cambridge, 2011.
- Giuseppe Molteni in Correspondence with Giovanni Morelli - The Restoration of Renaissance Painting in mid nineteenth-century Milan, Florence 2014.
- The Creation of Indigenous Collections in Melbourne: How Kenneth Clark, Charles Mountford, and Leonhard Adam Interrogated Australian Indigeneity. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris
- Unconstrained Passions. The Architect’s House as a Museum, Lyon Housemuseum, 2016
Exhibitions
- Renaissance, 15th & 16th century Italian paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, with Ron Radford, Giovanni Valagussa, Jaynie Anderson, Attilio Pizzigoni and David Wise: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2011-2012.
- Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, With David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Deborah Howard, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2006/2007
- ‘Sansovino Portrait?’Exhibition on Constructing Architectural identity, based on a previously unknown portrait of Sansovino, at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2000
- Giovanni Morelli. Collezionista di disegni. La donazione al Castello Sforzesco. Exhibition of Renaissance drawings at the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, 1994
- Le Muse e il Principe. Arte di corte nel Rinascimento padano, Exhibition at the Museo Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan, 1991