Professor of Art History Melinda Schlitt, outside the Weiss Center for the Arts, the home of the Department of Art & Art History. Photo by Dan Loh.
by Tony Moore
Professor of Art History Melinda Schlitt, Dickinson’s William W. Edel Professor of Humanities, earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. She teaches courses in art and architecture and has published on Galileo's Moon Drawings, Francesco Salviati, Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo and the relationship between language and imagery in the Renaissance. She has edited and contributed to two books of essays: Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History and Gifts in Return: Essays in Honour of Charles Dempsey.
Art history offers a vast, nearly bottomless, (somehow) continually evolving field of exploration, where new insights might emerge every day. What makes Dickinson the place for students to immerse themselves in this millennia-spanning study and examine art through a deeper, more focused lens?
As respected and accomplished scholars in their fields, our faculty in art history engage students with a rich diversity of qualitative courses that embrace 5,000 years of visual history and culture across four continents. The questions and issues we bring to our classes are continually informed by recent discoveries, new knowledge, revised interpretations and often technical innovations or analyses that can enrich or completely revise an accepted understanding of a work of art. Faculty also regularly incorporate works from the rich permanent collection of the Trout Gallery into their classes, and field trips to regional museums and galleries are also an important part of most classes.
The fact that our department combines the disciplines of art history and studio art under one roof allows for a dynamic collaboration between practicing artists and scholars around the centrally important processes of ideation and creative expression that informs any work of art. And that collaboration gives our students exposure to a deeper understanding they would not have access to elsewhere. Whether art history majors intending to pursue one of several successful professional paths, minors who are combining their study of art history with another major, or students who just take one art history course during their time at Dickinson, all are challenged to see and investigate works of art within historical, cultural, scholarly and critical contexts that they would have otherwise not considered.
You’ve dedicated your career to exploring the intersections of art, poetry and architecture, with research spanning from Michelangelo to Galileo’s moon drawings. What initially drew you to this field, and what's kept your passion alive over the years?
My mother was a painter and interior designer, and I grew up in and around art—both at home and in museums. At college I discovered the discipline of art history and was most fortunate to have had immensely inspiring and accomplished professors for the courses I took. I soon learned that art history was one of the most interdisciplinary of disciplines within the humanities. For example, languages, literature, politics, economics, religion and history—among other societal manifestations—intersected with and helped define the making and reception of art for centuries.
There was always something new to discover and learn both about the historical and cultural context of any given work of art, and also that work's still-resonant meaning in the present. I went on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University where my renowned mentor there, Charles Dempsey, further helped me refine what he called "the beacon light of scholarship," which was grounded in the cultivation of ideas in the pursuit of knowledge and the nobility of that pursuit.
What keeps my "passion alive" as an art historian is the pursuit itself—the endeavor and challenge of transforming the varieties of human expression in art into what we might call a cosmos of culture. And there is nothing more gratifying than to see this kind realization on one of my students' faces when the various threads they have been engaged with in a course suddenly come together as a cohesive braid.
Your work highlights the transformative power of art and its connection to culture and cultural identity. Why do you think studying art in its many forms—whether from the Italian Renaissance or Ancient Greece—remains so vital today, far beyond the classroom?
I think the answer to this question is pretty straightforward: Studying art puts you in a dialogue with the culture of art as human expression. And above all else, art is civilizing; it organizes and reveals to us the experience of humankind. It tells us who we are and what we can be.
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Published January 28, 2025