Craig S. Harbison (April 19, 1944 – May 17, 2018)Obituary: Craig Harbison, Professor Emeritus of Art History
/ref> was an American

art historian Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...

specialising in 15th and 16th-century Flemish and Northern Renaissance painting. He was Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While attending Princeton University in the early 1970s, he studied iconographic analysis under Erwin Panofsky and Wolfgang Stechow. He had previously studied at

Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...

, Ohio. While Panofsky was a large influence early in Harbison's career, and he described himself as once being "sort of a rebellious Panofsky-ite",Buchholz, Sarah R.
A Picture Worth Many Thousand Words
. ''Chronicle'', University of Massachusetts, 14 April 2000. Retrieved 15 December 2012. he move away from pure study of iconography toward placing the paintings in the context of the social history of their time.Craig Harbison
". University of Massachusetts. Retrieved 15 December 2012. He said, "Social history was becoming increasingly important. Panofsky had never really talked about what kind of people these were. I went after the people in all of these van Eyck paintings, researched about patrons." Harbison published a number of books on the Northern Renaissance and wrote extensively for such publications as ''

Art Quarterly Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of what ...

'', '' The Art Bulletin'', '' Renaissance Quarterly'' and ''Simiolus''. He wrote extensively on

Jan van Eyck Jan van Eyck ( , ; – July 9, 1441) was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. Ac ...

, especially the painter's ''

Arnolfini Portrait ''The Arnolfini Portrait'' (or ''The Arnolfini Wedding'', ''The Arnolfini Marriage'', the ''Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife'', or other titles) is a 1434 oil painting on oak panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It fo ...

''.

Publications

* ''The Last Judgment in Sixteenth Century Northern Europe, A Study in the Relation between Art and the Reformation''. New York: Garland, 1975. * Religious imagination and art- historical method: a reply to Barbara Lane's 'Sacred versus profane'. "Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art" 19, 3 (1989), 198- 205. * ''Jan van Eyck, the Play of Realism''. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. * ''The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context''. New York: Abrams, 1995. * ''The Art of the Northern Renaissance''. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.

Sources

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harbison, Craig 1944 births 2018 deaths American art historians University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Princeton University alumni Scholars of Netherlandish art