James Sloss Ackerman

James Sloss Ackerman is the former Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Professor Ackerman is the doyen of the international community of historians of Renaissance architecture. He is one of the scholars to have created the modern history of architecture, founded on a systematic approach and making use of a critical examination of all written and visual sources. It is capacity to use erudition, a sharp sense of observation combined with the sensibility for architecture and an innate facility to bring back to life the great architects of the past with immediacy, almost making them our contemporaries and constantly present in our culture, is perhaps the greatest of Ackerman’s achievements. His work has had a considerable influence on both historians of architecture and architects themselves. In his field, he has written two of the most important monographs of the century that has just closed, dedicated to Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio. He has had publications on the history of architecture, particularly in the Renaissance, on Leonardo da Vinci and other subjects relating to the intersection of art and science, issues in art criticism and in historical methods. More recently, he has written on the interaction and invention in representation. He is a member of the British Academy, of the Royal Academy of Arts, of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura in Vicenza, of the Ateneo Veneto end of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. In 2003, he was awarded the Balzan Prize in the field of the history of architecture and gave half of the prize money to help young architectural historians, financing the publication of their first work via the annual James Ackerman Prize for the history of architecture (now at its fourth edition), and instituting a scholarship at the American Academy in Rome for young foreign students wishing to undertake paleographic studies in Italian archives.