David M. Stone, Professor of Art History and Director of the Curatorial Track Ph.D. in Art History, is a specialist in Italian Baroque art. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His method seeks to integrate technical art history, connoisseurship, and stylistic analysis with close study of seventeenth-century literary and artistic theory, religious and political culture, and patterns of patronage and art collecting. Many of his seminars involve working with original objects at local museums.
Professor Stone is best known for his work on Caravaggio. Much of his recent research is devoted to the artist's 15-month sojourn on the island of Malta, where Caravaggio served the Catholic military order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, eventually becoming an honorary member of the order himself. For research on Caravaggio and the Knights of Malta, Stone received a 1995-1996 Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellowship in the Department of European Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a 1997-1998 Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Art History from the American Academy in Rome. For 2002-2003, he was awarded a two-term membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. In 2004-2005, Stone participated in the groundbreaking exhibition, Caravaggio: The Final Years, organized by the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and the National Gallery in London. He recently published (with K. Sciberras) Caravaggio: Art, Knighthood, and Malta (Malta: Midsea, 2006); "Self and Myth in Caravaggio's David and Goliath" (rev. version), in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. G. Warwick (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2006); and "Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood," Art Bulletin 94 (December 2012). In 2009, Stone co-chaired an historic six sessions on Caravaggio and his followers for the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles. A selection of papers from this conference (and others) is now gathered in L. Pericolo and D. M. Stone (eds.), Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), which includes Stone's essay, "Caravaggio Betrayals: The Lost Painter and the 'Great Swindle.'"
A leading international authority on the Bolognese artist Guercino, Professor Stone organized Guercino, Master Draftsman: Works from North American Collections, an exhibition which traveled to the Harvard University Art Museums, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1991. He also wrote the accompanying catalogue (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1991). In the same year he published Guercino: Catalogo complete dei dipinti (Florence: Cantini Editore, 1991), a complete catalogue of the artist's paintings. While consultant to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for their 1992 Guercino exhibition, Professor Stone organized and chaired "Guercino: Nature and Idea; A Quadricentennial Symposium." Sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, the two-day symposium was accompanied by an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum curated by Stone: Mostly Baroque: Italian Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of Carlo Croce. More recently he co-curated (with B. Buscaroli) a small exhibition at the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna: Il Gesto Trattenuto: Torna a Bologna un alfresco del Guercino; "La Madonna che offer un bocciolo di rosa al Bambino" (exh. cat., Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2006). He also contributed an essay to Guercino: Early Paintings from Cento and Bologna, ed. F. Gozzi and M. Naldi (Bologna: MGP, 2009), which accompanied an exhibition of the same title held in New York and Bologna: "Il 'vero' Guercino e il vero" [and in English: "The 'Real' Guercino and Reality"]. Stone also contributed entries on Guercino to several recent exhibition catalogues, including Il Cavalier Calabrese: Mattia Preti, tra Caravaggio e Luca Giordano, ed. V. Sgarbi and K. Sciberras (Milan: Silvana, 2013), and Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, ed. Laura M. Giles et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
Stone teaches courses on a wide variety of topics, including seminars on Caravaggio: Methods and Mythologies; Authorship and Authenticity in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Drawings; Originality, Virtuosity, Creativity in Italian Art and Theory; Bernini and Roman Baroque Sculpture; Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi; Guercino: Painter and Draftsman; Caravaggio's Followers, from Manfredi to Ribera; Bolognese Painting from the Carracci to Crespi; and Baroque Poetics and Imagery. He also regularly teaches an undergraduate survey of European Baroque Art and Architecture; and an introductory course on Western Art: Renaissance to Modern.
Stone is a Trustee of the American Academy in Rome and a member of the AAR Advisory Council to the Committee on the School of Classical Studies. He is also Chief External Examiner in the Department of History of Art, University of Malta.
