A voluminous acquisition
Renaissance and Baroque collection "treasure”

Assistant Professor of Art History Sarah C. McPhee displays selections from a fifteen-thousand-volume collection of rare art history texts.

EMORY’S acquisition of a collection of fifteen thousand volumes of Italian Renaissance and Baroque treatises, guidebooks, and poetry is expected to greatly enhance the University’s eight-year-old doctoral program in art history.

“The new material transforms the holdings of the library in art history,” says department chair Clark V. Poling. “Students and faculty in disciplines across the arts, humanities, and history will benefit from this new treasure.”

The collection includes sixteenth-century architectural volumes and a seventeenth-century guidebook to Roman monuments, as well as some two thousand rare books.

A substantial amount of Northern European material is included from the same periods, so “the collection [also] chronicles the issues and debates of art history in its infancy in nineteenth-century Vienna,” says Assistant Professor of Art History Sarah C. McPhee.

Housed in Woodruff Library, the acquisition is from a private collection built from 1895 to 1990 and brings the library’s total holdings in art history to nearly seventy thousand volumes. The University purchased the collection in February 1998.

“Given the long tradition of scholarship on the Renaissance and Baroque periods, there is a great universe of publications, but many of them are so scarce that we could never have obtained them on an individual basis,” says Director of Library Collections Jane B. Treadwell. “This represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to assemble a research-level collection of this importance.”—G.F.