Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Photo: Hans Glave

Kay Fortson Chair in European Art, University of Texas at Austin

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2010

Jeffrey Chipps Smith holds the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the Texas faculty in 1979 after receiving his PhD from Columbia University. Smith specializes in the art and architecture of Northern Europe, especially German and Netherlandish, between 1400 and 1700. His books include Nuremberg, A Renaissance City, 1500-1618 (1983); German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, c. 1520-1580: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (1994); Sensuous Worship: The Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (2002); The Northern Renaissance (2004); The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (2006); Dürer (Phaidon, 2012); and, co-edited with Larry Silver, The Essential Dürer (2010).

Project Description

German Sculpture 1580-1660: To the Glory of God and Man

At the Academy, Smith’s project addressed a prominent gap in art historical research: he aims to write a sequel to his German Sculpture of the Later Renaissance, 1520-1580, which presents a multidimensional account of a highly complex period in European art history and has become a standard reference work. Exploring the remarkable resurgence of sculpture during the last decades of the sixteenth century and tracking its development through the crisis of the Thirty Years War, his current project addresses questions both of the function of art in the consolidation of confessional religious identity as well as of the role of sculpture in the promotion of political power. He is also completing a monograph on Albrecht Dürer, which was commissioned by Phaidon Press.

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