University of South Florida

College of The Arts

University of South Florida

Essay by Professor Helena Szepe Published in the Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Paintings

Congratulations to USF Professor of Art History, Helena Szépe, for her essay on the Renaissance painter Girolamo dai Libri that was published in February in The Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Paintings, edited by Sandra Hindman and Federica Toniolo (University of Chicago, 2021).

Her extensive essay “Illuminating Law and Order in Venice,” has also just been published in Beyond Words: New Research in Manuscripts in Boston Collections, edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Harvard University (Brepols and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2021).

Professor Szépe has also submitted, as editor, a book manuscript on The Art of the Renaissance Book to Brepols in December, and is editing a book on the female monastery of Santa Croce della Giudecca in collaboration with the University of Padua, the Accademia Galleries of Venice, and the Correr Museum, Venice.

Szépe specializes in the art history of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, with special teaching and research interests in the complex interactions of technology, culture, and art during the shift from manuscript production to print. She is particularly interested in how embellishment of books can transform them into more potent symbols and attributes of their owners. She also studies collecting, and how we might discern the changing meaning of objects through the condition in which they were obtained and maintained.

She is known for her 2018 Publication of Venice Illuminated: Power and Painting in Renaissance Manuscripts and winning the “2019 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Best Book Prize in Renaissance Venetian Studies, sponsored by the Renaissance Society of America Recipient of the 2019 Helen & Howard R. Marraro Prize, sponsored by the American Historical Association,” according to Yale University Press.