Richard E. Spear (born 1940 in Michigan City, Indiana) is an American art historian and professor who specializes in Italian Baroque painting. In 1965 he married artist Athena Tacha.
Education and academic career Spear was educated in art history at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1961) and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1965). His research and publications have focused on seventeenth-century European art, ranging from a two-volume catalogue raisonné on Domenichino (1581–1641) to studies based on iconographic, psychoanalytic, feminist, and economic methodologies. He taught at Oberlin College from 1965 until 2000, where he also directed the Allen Memorial Art Museum (1972–83). He was appointed distinguished visiting professor at George Washington University in 1983–84 and held the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1997–98. Since 1998, he has been distinguished visiting and affiliated research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Main publications and research Caravaggio and his Followers, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1971, rev. ed., Harper & Row, New York, 1975 John Canady, "For Scholars, Painters and Everybody", The New York Times, 7 November 1971, p. D 21Douglas Davis, "The Roughneck Gang," Newsweek, 8 November 1971, p. 120Robert Hughes, "The First Bohemian", Time, 15 November 1971, p. 54Julius Held, "Caravaggio and His Followers," Art in America, LX, May–June 1972, pp. 40-47Benedict Nicolson, "Caravaggesques at Cleveland", The Burlington Magazine, CXIV, 1972, pp. 113-17 Renaissance and Baroque Paintings from the Sciarra and Fiano Collections, The Pennsylvania State University Press and Ugo Bozzi, Rome, 1972 Domenichino, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982 Sir John Pope-Hennessy, “The Sensuous and the Cerebral,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 1983, p. 305Ann Sutherland Harris, “Domenichino,” The Burlington Magazine, CXXVI, 1984, pp. 166-68 Domenichino, 1581-1641 (exhibition catalogue), Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 1996, pp. 163–69, 368-473 The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997Guy Callan, “The 'Divine' Guido,” The Art Book, VI, 1999, no. 1, pp. 35-37Philip Sohm, “The 'Divine' Guido,” The Art Bulletin, LXXXII, 2000, pp. 358-61
From Caravaggio to Artemisia: Essays on Painting in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France, The Pindar Press, London, 2002 Painting for Profit: the Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters (with Philip Sohm), Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010 Dipingere per profitto. Le vite economiche dei pittori nella Roma del Seicento, Campisano, Rome, 2016 (editor) Visualizing the Universe: Athena Tacha's Proposals for Public Art Commissions 1972-2012, Grayson, Washington, D.C., 2017 (editor) Fifty Years Inside an Artist's Mind: The Journal of Athena Tacha, Owl Press, Washington, D.C., 2020 Caravaggio's 'Cardsharps' on Trial: Thwaytes v. Sotheby's, The Burlington Press, London, 2020 The Art of Athena Tacha. A Complete Catalogue, Owl Press, Washington, D.C. 2022
Spear's research on prices paid to painters in seventeenth-century Rome is a searchable online database administered by the Getty Research Institute.http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/provenance_index/payments_to_artists/index.html Payments to Artists:Pilot Project: 17th-Century Rome], The Getty In addition to nearly 100 articles on Baroque art (see From Caravaggio to Artemisia: Essays on Painting in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France, pp. 601–06, for a complete bibliography through 2002), he has published studies on the European painting collection in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, India, and written for the Times Literary Supplement, The Artnewspaper, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune. He was editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin from 1985 to 1988.
Distinctions and awards Spear was art historian in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1988. He received many research grants, including a post-doctoral Fulbright scholarship to Italy (1966–67), and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1971–72), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980–81), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1983–84), the Guggenheim Foundation (1987–88), and the National Humanities Center (1992–93). Twice he won a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (1996, 2007). In 1972 he was awarded the Daria Borghese Gold Medal for the best book of the year dealing with a Roman subject.
References
External links Faculty page, Oberlin College Faculty page, University of Maryland at College Park