Jacqueline Marie Musacchio

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio is associate professor of art and teaches classes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art.  She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1989 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1995.  Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty in 2007, she was an associate professor of art at Vassar College; she also taught at Trinity University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Walters Art Museum.

Musacchio’s research focuses on the material culture of daily life during the Italian Renaissance, and she has published articles and given talks on birth trays, marriage chests, domestic devotional art, dowry goods, weasels and chickens and Fascist revivalism.  Her most recent book, Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (Yale University Press, 2008), investigates urban townhouses and their furnishings, and the relationship of that physical setting to the formation and ongoing life of the families who lived inside it.  It is closely related to her first book, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 1999), which examined the decorative and domestic objects, images and ephemera that surrounded childbirth in Italy from the late 14th through the early 17th centuries.  That book was awarded an honorable mention in the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s annual book award competition; it also received the Vasari Award from the Dallas Museum of Art and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. 

Musacchio has been involved in a number of museum exhibitions.  In 2004, she was guest curator of a six-venue traveling exhibition, Marvels of Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and she authored the accompanying catalogue of the same name (Bunker Hill Press, 2004). In 2006 she co-curated an exhibition with a colleague at Denison University on prints and photographs associated with early modern tourism in Egypt and Italy entitled The Tourist View; their research was funded in part by a Mellon Inter-Institutional Faculty Initiative Grant. That same year, she curated Copies, Casts, and Pedagogy: The Early Teaching of Art and Art History at Vassar College at the Loeb Art Center.

Musacchio contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue for At Home in Renaissance Italy, which took place at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2006-07.  Most recently, she served as a member of the organizing committee for the international loan exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in Fall 2008 and travels to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in Winter 2009; in addition to participating in the planning of the exhibition, she wrote entries and an essay for the accompanying catalogue. She also wrote an essay for the catalogue of the exhibition The Triumph of Marriage, which opened at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2008 and moves to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota in 2009.
 
Her new research looks at the cultural patronage and historiography of Bianca Cappello, a Grand Duchess of Tuscany in the late 16th century and a powerful patron who used the arts to try to control her reputation for posterity. Musacchio examines both the history and historiography of this little known but much maligned figure in the Medici court; in doing so she reveals as much about the gullibility of early modern historians and the ease with which we still condemn women who do not fit the stereotypes of their times as she does about Bianca herself. She received a fellowship from the Lewis-Walpole Library to support her preliminary work on this project, and she published an article on Bianca’s son, Antonio de’Medici, in John J. Martin’s The Renaissance World (Palgrave, 2007).

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