David Cast

Professor of History of Art David Cast is a specialist in Renaissance art and in the history of the classical tradition, from Botticelli and Palladio to Inigo Jones and Hawksmoor and on to the traditions of life drawing and the academies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work has been supported with fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the American Council of Learned Societies. Beyond his books, The Calumny of Apelles: a Study in the Humanist Tradition, Yale University Press, 1981 and The Delight of Art: Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse, 2009, his work has been published in European and American journals, Simiolus, The Burlington Magazine, Word&Image, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, The Art Bulletin, and in many encyclopedias, including the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and the International Dictionary of Architects and Architecture, and in the collective volumes Renaissance Humanism: Foundation, Forms and Legacy, 1988, Giorgio Vasari: Art, Literature and History at the Medici Court, 1998: Reading Vasari, 2005: and most recently The Historian’s Eye: Essays on Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis, 2009.

His work in progress includes a Companion Volume on the historian and artist Giorgio Vasari, a book on the English 18th century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and a selection of the writings of Andrew Forge, an artist and critic of English art in the second half of the 20th century. He teaches courses on Mannerism and Vasari at the graduate level and undergraduate classes on the Classical Tradition, London (his home town), Palladio, Frescos and public art, and Renaissance painting. Since coming to the department, he has supervised eight M.A. theses and seventeen dissertations.