Jack M. Greenstein

Professor Emeritus

jgreenstein@ucsd.edu

Biography
Jack M. Greenstein is author of Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1992) and The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism: Visual Theology and Artistic Invention (Cambridge University Press, 2016) as well as articles on Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Sala della Pace Frescoes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, temporalities of the face in Renaissance portrait painting, time in pictorial narrative, composition and perspective in Renaissance art theory, and the concept of iconicity in Aristotle and in modern semiotics. He has published in such leading journals as The Art Bulletin, Art History, Artibus et Historiae, The Burlington Magazine, Print Collector’s Newsletter, Public, Viator, and Word & Image, and is co-editor with William Tronzo of California Italian Studies, issue 6 which is devoted to the theme The Fixity and Flexibility of Images. A member of the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD since 1982, he has also taught at Northwestern University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Besides grants from the Academic Senate and the Chancellor’s Office, he is recipient of fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1992-93, he was a full-term member of the School of History Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Like his scholarship, Greenstein’s teaching looks at the consistencies, disparities and tensions between theory and practice in late medieval and Renaissance art. For lower-division students, he teaches the required course on Information Technologies in Art History; for upper-division students, lecture courses on Renaissance Art, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, as well as seminars on Mona Lisa, Narrative Structures in Painting, and other topics. His Ph.D. courses include Renaissance Portrait Painting and Theories of Representation.