Lilian Armstrong is the Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Art at Wellesley College. She received her M.A. from Radcliffe in 1959 and her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Columbia University in 1966. Professor Armstrong has been teaching at Wellesley since 1964; she offers courses and seminars in Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture as well as a course in the history of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Illumination. Her areas of scholarly specialization are Venetian art and the Illumination of North Italian manuscripts and early printed books.

Professor Armstrong has published two books on North Italian painting and book illumination, The Painting and Drawings of Marco Zoppo (1976) and Renaissance Miniature Painters and Classical Imagery: the Master of the Putti and His Venetian Workshop (1981). She was also a co-author of The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1995, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts London and at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York in 1994-1995. She has contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals on Renaissance book decoration.

Among honors and fellowships, Professor Armstrong was named the first holder of the Marion Butler McLean Chair in the History of Ideas at Wellesley College (1983-1987); was appointed a Visiting Scholar to the Department of Manuscripts of the J. Paul Getty Museum (Spring 1988); and was a Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Spring 1997). She has also been the recipient of three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for College Teachers (1984-85; 1991-92; and 1999-2000).

During her years at Wellesley, Lilian has twice served terms as Chair of the Art Department and has been elected and appointed to many college committees including two terms on the Committee on Faculty Appointments (the College's tenure committee), the Academic Review Board and the Full Professors Merit Review Committee among others.

Profile last updated: 8/05