IU 'team' helps mount first North American museum exhibition

The Grand Rapids exhibition opening in two weeks is the first international Perugino show in 50 years and the list of exhibition scholars and consultants who have made it happen reads like an IU art history 'team' roster.

By Erik Novak

Joseph Becherer, a doctoral student in art history finishing his dissertation on Italian Renaissance master painter Pietro Perugino, pulled off a curatorial masterstroke recently by helping to secure an unprecedented loan of nine works by Perugino from the Galleria National dell' Umbria in Perugia, Italy, the largest repository of works by Perugino in the world.

A guest curator at the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Art Museum, Becherer is managing the only Perugino exhibition ever to be seen in the United States, and the first exhibition in more than 50 years internationally of the influential Italian artist.

The Grand Rapids Art Museum is the only venue for the landmark exhibition, which opens Nov. 16 and runs through Feb. 1.

Since 1991, Becherer has been affiliated with the Grand Rapids Community College as a professor of art history, chair of the department of art history, and currently as the assistant dean of the school of social science and humanities.

According to Becherer, Perugino is one of the most distinguished painters of the Italian Renaissance, and his work provided the foundation for the aesthetic developments of the High Renaissance.

Painting "As the teacher of Raphael and a colleague of both Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, Perugino played a very prominent and influential role in the history of art,"said Bickerer. Perugino received some of the most distinguished international commissions of his day -- among those is the decoration of the walls of the Sistine Chapel with Botticelli, Dominic Ghirlando and Cosimo Roselli. "Undoubtedly, he was one of the most active masters and teachers of the Italian Renaissance," said Bickerer. "A critical study of this master is essential for a more complete understanding of the age."

Nearly three generations of IU scholars and art historians joined Becherer in undertaking the Perugino project. Early on, Bickerer contacted his mentor, Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of fine arts and chair of the Department of Art History at IUB, and author of numerous definitive books on Italian Renaissance, to see if he was "on the right track" in his research. The networking payed off.

"The show is nearly an all-IU product. Becherer got people from IU to write and edit the catalog entries as well."
Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of fine arts and chair of the department of art history, IUB

Notably, it's the first such catalog on Perugino written in English.

Cole and a team of IU alumni, graduate students and faculty brought their expertise to putting together an exhibition.

The list of exhibition scholars and consultants reads like an IU art history team roster: Bickerer's peers are Jody Shiffman, an art history alumna who helped edit and translate the exhibition catalog, and Katherine Smith Abbott, an IU alumna who is currently a visiting assistant professor at Middlebury College.

Painting The exhibition is documented in a major catalog examining each work, Perugino's career and the era in which he worked.

Part of the catalog came from work done by Julia Conaway Bondanella, associate professor of Italian at IUB, who examined the original works of Giorgio Vasari, the first historian of Italian art and the first chronicler of Perugino himself. Other IU alumni include Marilyn Bradshaw, associate dean in the college of fine arts at Ohio University, and Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor of comparative literature at IUB.