Jodi Cranston
Professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Boston University
Professor Jodi Cranston received her B.A. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University and her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She is the author of two books, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Facture in Titian’s Later Paintings (Penn State University Press, 2010); editor and contributor to Venetian Painting Matters, 1450-1750 (Brepols, 2014); and has contributed several articles to interdisciplinary Renaissance publications. She was the recipient of a Charles Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2004-5. An active participant in international scholarly conferences in art history and Renaissance studies, Professor Cranston is currently working on a book-length project entitled, The Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice, and has recently launched a digital mapping project that visualizes the provenance of Titian’s pictures from the 16th century to the present day. She received a Digital Art History Grant from the Kress Foundation to develop the application, which eventually will be available to other scholars for mapping artworks by other artists and cultures.
“Mapping Titian,” functions as an archive and as an interpretative and teaching site by documenting and mapping one of the most fundamental concerns of the discipline of Art History: the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context. Focusing on the paintings executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist, Titian (ca. 1488-1576), this site creates a searchable provenance index of his attributed pictures (totaling over 500 paintings) and uses geographic and non-geographic maps to interpret an historical network of artists, collectors, art dealers, travelers, and patrons through the movement of these objects. Users can customize their experience of the website by specifying the parameters of their search interests and by having the opportunity to create their own maps, as well as export user-selected bibliographies, related documents, and provenance entries.