Temple University

Marcia Hall is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Renaissance Art. She is a teacher and scholar of Italian Renaissance painting who has written widely on painting in the sixteenth century, Raphael, Michelangelo and those who followed them. She began her career studying the Counter-Reformation at a time when it was a neglected subject and continues to contribute with books authored and edited as well as professional lectures and graduate seminars. Her other particular interest is technical art history, especially the way painters used color. She has studied artists’ techniques using conservation laboratory research, extending her reach to World War I in her book, The Power of Color. Five Centuries of European Painting (2019). She has a book in press with Yale University Press (due 2024) entitled The Lingering Look: Discovering the Unexpected in Paintings and she is guest editor of a special issue of Arts online journal, for which she has commissioned twenty essays. The issue will be titled The Affective Image (due March 2024). In addition, she has chapters on sacred art in The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent (2023) and The History of Reformation Era Theology (Cambridge, 2023).
 
In addition to editing the series Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2005-2017), Hall has been awarded three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, two Fulbright fellowships, and fellowships in residence at the Villa I Tatti, Center for the Advanced Study of Art in Washington D. C. and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1993, Temple University awarded her the Creative Achievement Award, which recognizes outstanding creative work that is considered to have national and/or international significance. She has served as the Clark Visiting Professor at the graduate program of Williams College at the Clark Art Institute and as Visiting Lecturer at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware.

Dr. Hall is no longer accepting PhD students.
 
PhD, Harvard University, 1967
MA, Radcliffe College, 1962
BA, Wellesley College, 1960
 
Selected Awards
The ACE Mercers Book Prize, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque (2011)
American Association of Italian Studies
The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio

Selected Work
Hall, M. B. (2011). The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco,
     Caravaggio. London and New York: Yale University Press.

Hall, M. B. (2002). Michelangelo. The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams.

Hall, M. B. (1992). Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. Cambridge,
     England: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, M. B. (1990). After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, England: 
     Cambridge University Press.

Hall, M. B. (1979). Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa MariaNovella
     and Santa Croce, 1565-77. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.