An art historian’s four-year, globe-spanning journey of mind, body, and soul
By Kevin Charles Redmon ’09
Photographs by Mark Ostow
“Animated” doesn’t begin to describe Katy Smith Abbott when she’s talking about her work. If there’s suspense to be had discussing paintings from the 15th century, she’s able to mine it. When she’s deep into a project, she’ll tell you, hunting down obscure paintings and sorting through unexamined curatorial files, an unexpected discovery is cause enough to scream—quite literally so. She screamed upon finding two paintings, hidden behind a door, on the top floor of the Bargello, in Siena, and she screamed on a Friday in September, upon stepping into Johnson Hall in the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy was set to go up.
As Smith Abbott walked around the exhibition space, she gestured to blank expanses of wall and discussed the paintings as if the works already hung there; in fact, they were just beginning to arrive, in sarcophagus-like crates. An empty gallery is enough to set her spinning rapidly in circles, like a theatre director walking through a partially constructed set before opening night. Indeed, Smith Abbott seemed barely able to contain her anticipation.
Smith Abbott has a doctorate in art history from Indiana University and a perfect isosceles triangle for a nose. Youth is still very much on her side. Despite her 17 years of teaching experience, she still exudes the buoyant energy and unbridled curiosity of a first-year professor. Consider the focus and excitement displayed by a three-year-old when telling you about a favorite dinosaur. Now add an eight-cup pot of coffee.
Smith Abbott’s preferred form of discourse is the soliloquy. She often has to write down what she wants to say, for fear of getting lost in a narrative tangent. To hear her describe the Herculean effort involved in the four-year process of developing an art exhibition is like embarking on a trip through a rather erudite fun house—equally disorienting and thrilling.
This particular journey begins with a painting in London, in 2005. Around Thanksgiving of that year, Smith Abbott’s phone rang. On the line was Richard Saunders, director of the Middlebury Museum of Art. Saunders told her that the College was considering bidding on an early Renaissance painting that was up for auction. Middlebury had been looking to acquire a painting from the period for some time—“Until that point, the College owned nothing from the early Renaissance,” says Smith Abbott, who specializes in the Renaissance—and the offering at Sotheby’s was a perfect fit.
Saunders sketched Smith Abbott a biography of the artist: Lippo d’Andrea, a Florentine, working from the late-1300s into the mid-1400s. Smith Abbott didn’t recognize the name—“Because there are [so many] Renaissance artists, unless they’re the really big ones, you’re not going to have heard of them,” she explains—but both the artist and the work, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari, captured her attention. Conservation work would be minimal, and, most striking of all, the wood-panel painting still hung in its original frame. For an object that’s approaching its 600th birthday—well, consider the condition of your kitchen cutting board in 2609.
Saunders told Smith Abbott that a small, liberal arts college museum was unlikely to win a bidding war against international collectors. Still, Saunders received permission from the College to proceed, using the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund and the Walter Cerf Art Fund, and on December 9 the Museum placed the winning bid; everyone involved was a little surprised, except perhaps Smith Abbott.
It was then that she heard a bit of disconcerting information. A distinguished scholar attached to both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had studied Virgin and Child Enthroned, and he disagreed with its attribution to Lippo d’Andrea. Laurence Kanter, the curator of early European art at Yale and of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met, thought the piece was by a different painter entirely. “Waiting for it to be delivered,” says Smith Abbott, “I realized that we had acquired a series of puzzles. Chief among them was that of authorship.” That’s a delicate way of saying that, as far as she or anyone knew, her Lippo might not be a Lippo at all.
Attribution can sound like an academic parlor game, but art history scholars devote their lives to it. Six centuries after an artist produces hundreds of works, very few remain intact. “Because they’re made of wood, and because of fire and the vagaries of time, things are lost,” says Smith Abbott. Even less survives in the way of written documentation. A passing mention here, a faint signature there—the contemporary information most useful to scholars comes from what are essentially tax records.
With so-called minor artists, the result is major confusion and ambiguity. To impose order on the chaos, “we try to assemble pieces of art that look like each other into small groups—nuclei of works that, in our estimation, are homogenous,” explains Laurence Kanter. “And then, if we’re really lucky, one of the works will have a document or signature or tradition associated with it, and we can affix a name to the group.”
Lippo d’Andrea might best be understood as the Artist Formerly Known as Pseudo Ambrogio di Baldese. In the early 20th century, scholars decided that one of the works in the group could be firmly attributed to the Florentine Ambrogio. “Everyone thought this was a fact for the next 40 or 50 years,” says Kanter. “Then, another scholar cleverly pointed out that, because of an issue of dates, this couldn’t be right. Rather than get rid of the name, we called him ‘Pseudo Ambrogio.’ It’s a way of saying, ‘We had this great idea, we were wrong, but we don’t have a better idea yet.’”
In the 1970s, explains Smith Abbott, “When Italian scholars uncovered documents in the archives and realized this was Lippo d’Andrea, they got all excited. ‘Oh my gosh, we have a new artist to attribute paintings to!’ Occasionally, they go a little bananas, and all of a sudden there are hundreds of works attributed to this artist who could never have been so prolific.”
Kanter is skeptical that all the works in Lippo’s group were painted by one workshop. “It’s my certain belief that it’s not homogenous, that it’s two or three artists at work.” As such, he disagreed that Lippo d’Andrea had painted Virgin and Child Enthroned, but he didn’t submit a formal opinion to be included in the auction catalog.
It was this complex history of misattribution that Katy Smith Abbott acquired with her new painting. When she got word of Kanter’s unwritten dissent, she was intrigued. For an art history scholar, it was a bit like being handed a Sunday Times crossword, half completed. So she booked a flight to New York City.
Whirlwind is the pace at which Smith Abbott prefers to operate. Her 2006 trip to New York proceeded accordingly. After a long conversation with Kanter at the Met (“I got an earful about how this painting probably wasn’t by Lippo d’Andrea but by another artist with whom he’s often confused, an artist named Ventura di Moro”), she told him that she wanted to organize an exhibition around Virgin and Child Enthroned. Kanter replied that there were a number of paintings in the Yale collection that fit the themes of her project, works he would consider loaning out. “Then he says, ‘I have a friend in SoHo, a dealer and conservator named Marco Grassi. He has a painting by Ventura di Moro. You’ve got to see it. How long are you in New York?’ And I told him, ‘Less than 24 hours.’ So he says, ‘Let me call him right now.’” In an hour or two, Smith Abbott was supposed to be meeting a former student—Kate Fitzpatrick ’03, who was working upstairs in the Met’s legal department—for dinner. Smith Abbott tore up to her office. “I said, ‘Kate, I’m really sorry, we’re not going to dinner. We’re going on an adventure to SoHo. We have to get in a cab right now.’” It was as high-speed a trip as traffic allowed.
“We get dropped off where I think we’re supposed to be, but we don’t even have an address. Just an intersection. I imagined that it would be a gallery, but instead it’s an enormous brick building. We get in this dark, paneled elevator and it dumps us out on this long, dimly lit hall. There’s nothing but unmarked doors and, lining the hall, prints of ancient Florence. Meanwhile, this beautiful Italian aria is spilling out of somewhere and wafting down the hall.”
Smith Abbott and Fitzpatrick tried every door on the hall to no avail. Just as they were ready to abandon the idea, one of the vast doors swung open and standing on the threshold was Marco Grassi. “The first thing he asks is, ‘Would you rather have wine or espresso?’” For Smith Abbott, it was like stumbling through the looking glass: A beautiful room full of books, active conservation projects, and the enormous, 15th-century Ventura altarpiece that she’d been sent to see. Smith Abbott understood what Kanter meant when he suggested that the Museum’s Lippo painting might actually be a Ventura. There was continuity of style between the works. But seeing the Ventura answered few questions. Instead, it presented more ambiguous evidence and complicated her uncertainty.
Delicately, Smith Abbott and Grassi began discussing the exhibition that was taking shape in Smith Abbott’s mind—early Renaissance works, all pertaining to the act of religious devotion. Grassi embraced the idea, and he offered to loan the Ventura triptych to Abbott, an inexperienced curator he’d been unacquainted with less than an hour before. Smith Abbott left New York City with an idea for an ambitious show, several generous loan offers, but nothing to suggest that her Lippo was really a Lippo.
Mounting an exhibition is a formidable challenge. Smith Abbott, an art historian, has done it precisely zero times before. The panel paintings Abbott was seeking to borrow—planed poplar, segmented together with butterfly clips and covered with linen and gesso—are far less durable than canvas; many museums simply won’t loan them out. The cost in developing and curating a show is in the shipping and insurance; for every piece of art on loan, special crates must be built, drivers and couriers paid. Abbott knew she would have to draw up her wish list of works carefully. In the spring of 2006, she began to write planning grants to defray the cost of what would be nearly three years of preparatory work.
At the same time, Laurence Kanter paid a visit to Middlebury. “We met informally, with a small group of students,” Smith Abbott remembers. “We had this wonderful conversation about exhibition of the painting, what secrets it revealed as we looked at it, construction and execution, what it tells us about a time and place, and what big research questions it opened up.”
The conversation left an impact on Kanter, too. “In that colloquium, I think Katy crystallized her ideas for the show.” He continues, “Scholars in our field write books all the time. Most of those books get read by the three or four people who care and the rest molder in used bookstores for generations. Exhibitions are different animals—they’re designed to be seen by a broader public. Katy’s show is groundbreaking both in what she’s chosen to borrow and how she’s telling the story of a very familiar period. It’s the kind of thing that a university or college art museum can afford to do that a major public institution cannot.”
For Smith Abbott, the show now revolved around three issues: how devotional paintings served as both objects of piety and symbols of status; the culture and craft of how wood-panel paintings were created; and the mystery of the College’s own painting—how to discern authorship and why attribution matters. “Exhibitions can be very erudite, elitist things,” she observes. “How do you keep this relevant and meaningful, and how do we understand the research process and the discoveries that emerge? In a world plagued by very significant problems, why is this one worth solving? That’s part of the mystery I try to crack.”
In the fall of 2006, as Smith Abbott prepared to teach an upper-level art history seminar centered on Virgin and Child Enthroned, the issue of attribution continued to weigh on her. To press the question, she planned a research trip to
Florence. Hoping to find someone “madcap enough to follow me around Europe,” she called her former student Georgia Goodhue Reath ’01.
“I got a call from Katy saying, ‘I know this is totally crazy, but I’m flying to Florence in September. Why don’t you come?’” Reath was supposed to start a master’s program that week. “Instead, I said, ‘I’ll meet you there.’” Reath took Art History II with Smith Abbott as a freshman, and soon began babysitting Smith Abbott’s newborn son, Elliott. (When daughter Josie was born two years later, Reath babysat for her, too.) After she graduated, Reath says, “I stopped introducing Katy as my thesis adviser and started introducing her as one of my best friends.” (When Reath got married a few years ago, she asked Josie to be her flower girl.)
The trip to Florence was a Smith Abbott-style tour de force. “It was like going on a treasure hunt,” recalls Reath. “She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, but she wanted to see if one piece would lead her somewhere else.” At the top of Smith Abbott’s list was the Accademia, an art museum in the center of the city. “There’s a painting there that’s accepted as being by Lippo,” Smith Abbott explains. “It’s from that work that others are securely attributed.” In essence, it’s a touchstone work with strong documentation.
Because Lippo d’Andrea is not a major name from the period, his work is liable to turn up anywhere. “I went everywhere in Italy I thought his paintings might dwell,” says Smith Abbott. “You’re in a museum looking at something else and you round the corner, and suddenly you’d hear me yelling, ‘Aha! He’s in here!’”
On Reath’s final day in Italy, they went to the Bargello, a sculpture museum in Florence. “We didn’t think we’d find anything, we just thought it would be interesting.” Then, from the top floor, came a burst of shouts. They had discovered two Lippo paintings, one of which was literally hidden behind a door. (Both claim the other saw it first.) Reath remembered the moment: “Katy being Katy, she had this notebook that she would fill with all her scribbles, sketching paintings throughout the trip, trying to piece together an attribution for the Middlebury work. Sketches of patterns in the rugs, or the way angels’ faces were painted. She took it out and said, ‘Wow, this looks so similar.’”
Smith Abbott has no need for Divine Providence, which sometimes seems to guide her. “You have to be tough about research,” she says. “You go downstairs to find some information—nothing published. Nothing in the bookshop. You go to talk to a guard, and they tell you to talk to three other people, and finally you weasel your way back to the offices of the curatorial staff. They, of course, look at you beleaguered because it’s Italy and they’re all overworked, and they say, ‘Maybe in that publication from 1945 there might be a mention,’ and somebody gives a heavy sigh and goes to make a Xerox for you. It’s a big process. You have to decide how much you’re willing to humble yourself with imperfect Italian and explain your case.” (“Katy speaks beautiful, fluent Italian,” Reath confides.)
Slowly, Smith Abbott was putting together a case for confirming the attribution of Virgin and Child Enthroned to Lippo. Often, she would find herself studying the hands of the figures. They’re one of the most difficult aspects of the human form to capture, and artists approach the problem with consistent styles. The more Lippo paintings she tracked down and was able to study at close range, the more concordances she saw between the Virgin and Child Enthroned and the Lippo canon.
When she returned to Middlebury, Smith Abbott faced a daunting workload. At the suggestion of museum curator Emmie Donadio, Smith Abbott paid a visit to Wendy Watson, at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. “They have a small but really lovely collection of Renaissance objects and painting, and I immediately fell in love with several that I thought would be terrific in the show.”
Watson threw open her museum’s curatorial files to Smith Abbott and graduate intern Stuart Hurt ’07, and the three spent an afternoon poring over scholarly documents, old photographs, and handwritten notes in long, 19th-century script. (During this visit, Smith Abbott and Watson hit on the idea of a traveling show, one that would start at Middlebury and finish at Mount Holyoke. The Art of Devotion will open at the Mount Holyoke Art Museum in May 2010.)
Abbott then began 10 months of exhausting travel. Before sending out loan letters to museums around the country, she needed to see every painting she was proposing. Birmingham, Memphis, Tulsa, Kansas City, Lewisberg, New York, Minneapolis, Greenville and Columbia, Chapel Hill. “As soon as I would come back, if we decided we wanted to borrow it, we’d send a letter.” In a loan letter, a curator explains why the exhibition she’s proposing would be incomplete without the work in question. “I’d send it off with my heart in my throat, terribly giddy. And every time a letter came back and they’d agreed to loan it to me—well, it was all Christmas to me.”
For the first-time curator, the exhibit became, well, one of devotion. “The process was so rewarding, definitely hard, definitely overwhelming, terrifying, discouraging at times. It became so important to me, especially our painting, that there were those at the museum who joked that it was ‘Katy’s altarpiece.’ I was just so curious about it, and it opened up all these questions I couldn’t have seen coming.”
Workaholics are common enough. When Smith Abbott describes the frenetic pace at which she operates, it’s tempting to ask, At what cost? The most remarkable feat of skill in all this is her work-life balancing act. “There are not enough hours in the day, there’s not enough of me. I have young children, and I begin to wonder, is my family going to abandon me?” Suspended between both worlds, though, she seems not to run the risk of abandonment but rather to approach the point of self-actualization.
Like his wife, Steve Abbott, professor of mathematics, is a long-limbed beanpole. Unlike his wife, he speaks very slowly, as if selecting each word from a long list of choices. Both are keenly aware of the difficulty of having a two-academic household. “When our kids were very young,” remembers Abbott, “I moved my office next to hers. There are stories of me walking into class with a kid on my back as she was walking out, and I’d hand it off to her.”
“He’s what we refer to in our family as the Pit Crew,” Smith Abbott says. “I roar in, he gives me a new set of tires, and I roar back out again.” I asked if preparation for The Art of Devotion had taxed her relationship with her children—Josie, 9, and Elliott, 12. “Kids measure that sort of stuff. They’re barometers of when you’re doing too much.” She pauses. “This is a conversation Steve and I had a long time ago. We wanted our kids to see us engaged in meaningful work.”
Smith Abbott will tell you that she’s “dragged our kids through countless museums,” but Steve Abbott recalls it differently. “We went as a family to Italy one summer—and I was dubious that this was going to work. My children like Disney World, that’s obvious and easy. But we were going to Rome, to look at art and think about very abstract concepts. And Katy had this great idea. She gave them projects to research. Josie researched the Sistine ceiling. She was five or six years old at the time. Elliott did the Pantheon. Each of them interviewed different scholars on campus, and then when we went it was spectacular. Josie’s eyes when she saw that ceiling had lightning bolts in them. She couldn’t believe it.”
Abbott pads around the house, picking up framed photographs from the trip.
“The other thing Katy did was give them sketchbooks. We would go to different museums and look at these giant statues, and she’d get them to draw. They’d sit down and pull these books out. It made them look really intently at these things, in really thoughtful ways. That’s hard for [that age].”
In the fall of 2008, three years after Lippo d’Andrea turned Smith Abbott’s research into a transatlantic treasure hunt, she returned to Florence once more. “I’m not going to put a painting in the middle of an exhibition and say, ‘Well, we’re not really sure who it’s by.’ You could do that, but I was really eager to have a solid sense for myself.” By this point, she’d studied Lippo paintings all over the world, trying to sate her pangs of irresolution. Though attribution is something that’s continually refined rather than definitively known, Smith Abbott was relentless in her scholarship.
In Florence, she heard about a Lippo in the tiny hill town of San Miniato al Tedesco. Smith Abbott took a train and got off in the sleepy, unfamiliar town. She went from church to church, looking for the work that had been described to her. “The bus drivers have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m basically describing a church that doesn’t exist anymore. Finally there are these two wonderful but very aged people. And they say, ‘Oh, I love that church!’ They coerce me into getting on the bus with them, and we go up into the old part of town.” Finally, she happened upon a museum of religious art—and inside, found not one but two Lippo paintings. The church had been converted into the local pharmacist’s house, years ago.
Very little pictorial or scholarly evidence now remained that she hadn’t already pored over, sometimes two or three times. And so, using the touchstone Lippo work in the Accademia, she began to draw a series of strong linkages between all the works she’d seen on two sides of the Atlantic to Virgin and Child Enthroned.
The Art of Devotion opened on September 17 with a gallery talk and small reception. Ken Pohlman, the museum’s designer, had subtly transformed the Johnson Gallery into a series of archways and porticoes, recalling a Renaissance courtyard ringed by rooms. The sightlines of the gallery gave the illusion of being in a private home, surrounded by splendid displays of art.
Smith Abbott stood in the center of the gallery with the careful poise of a ballet dancer. She talked with expressive hands. Here, lecturing, she was in her element. She started from the beginning of the story. She told the audience about the mystery of attribution, about Grassi’s gallery, about San Miniato al Tedesco.
She said, “One of the goals of this exhibition is to show devotional panel paintings as quotidian objects, which is exactly how patrons at the time understood them. They had dynamic functions: They were signs of wealth. They were symbols of taste. They were reflections of status. It seems paradoxical to us but it wasn’t a paradox to them. I want to illuminate—” She paused and looked at the audience out of the corner of her eye, like she was giving up a really good secret. “—the thingyness of the objects.”
There was no erudition or pretention, no technical curatorial jargon, no inaccessible discussion of connoisseurship. The audience laughed, but also nodded—the slow nod one uses to indicate sudden insight and understanding.
Emmie Donadio appeared at Smith Abbott’s side and handed her a bouquet of coral-colored roses. Donadio beamed and Smith Abbot beamed back, tall and confident. For just a moment, Lippo d’Andrea’s Virgin and Child Enthroned wasn’t the leading lady in the gallery.
Kevin Redmon will graduate from Middlebury this spring. He wrote “Grape Expectations” in the spring 2009 issue of the magazine.