Department of Art History

Congratulations to Christine Zappella Papanastassiou (Ph.D. Candidate, Art History) for being awarded the Carl S. Meyer Prize for her paper, “The Meta/Physics of Light, Confraternal Worship, and Andrea del Sarto’s Monochrome Life of St. John the Baptist,” presented at the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference (SCSC) 2019 annual conference held in St. Louis. The prize committee commented on the paper: “Ticking all the boxes from empiricism and method to impact, Zappella Papanastassiou uses ‘critical fabulation’ to reconstruct the experiences of worship and penance by the Confraternity of St. John the Baptist in sixteenth-century Florence. The paper focuses on Andrea del Sarto’s monochrome paintings of St. John the Baptist, but instead of approaching them from a textual standpoint, asks about their ‘plausible embodied experience.’”

The Carl S. Meyer Prize, named for the co-founding editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal and one of the founders of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, professor of historical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, as well as executive director of the Center (Foundation) for Reformation Research, is awarded annually for the best paper delivered at the yearly SCSC meeting.

Past prize recipients include current doctoral student Anatole Upart for his paper “A Ukrainian Apocalypse in Rome: Master Prokopii’s Woodblock Prints at the Archives of the Propaganda Fide” presented at SCSC Milwaukee in 2017.