# Craig Harbison

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{{Short description|American art historian}}
'''Craig Stephen Harbison''' (April 19, 1944 – May 17, 2018)<ref>[http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/obituary-craig-harbison-professor-emeritus Obituary: Craig Harbison, Professor Emeritus of Art History]</ref> was an American [art historian](/source/art_historian) specialising in 15th and 16th-century [Flemish](/source/Early_Netherlandish_painting) and [Northern Renaissance](/source/Northern_Renaissance) painting. He was Professor Emeritus of Art History at the [University of Massachusetts Amherst](/source/University_of_Massachusetts_Amherst). While attending [Princeton University](/source/Princeton_University) in the early 1970s, he studied [iconographic](/source/Iconography) analysis under [Erwin Panofsky](/source/Erwin_Panofsky) and [Wolfgang Stechow](/source/Wolfgang_Stechow). He had previously studied at [Oberlin College](/source/Oberlin_College), Ohio.

While Panofsky was a large influence early in Harbison's career, and he described himself as once being "sort of a rebellious Panofsky-ite",<ref name="BuchholZ">Buchholz, Sarah R. "[http://www.umass.edu/chronicle/archives/00/04-14/harbison28.html A Picture Worth Many Thousand Words]". ''Chronicle'', [University of Massachusetts](/source/University_of_Massachusetts), 14 April 2000. Retrieved 15 December 2012.</ref> he moved away from pure study of iconography toward placing the paintings in the context of the social history of their time.<ref name="Umass">"[http://www.umass.edu/arthist/harbison.htm Craig Harbison] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130605061635/http://www.umass.edu/arthist/harbison.htm |date=2013-06-05 }}". University of Massachusetts. Retrieved 15 December 2012.</ref> He said, "Social history was becoming increasingly important. Panofsky had never really talked about what kind of people these were. I went after the people in all of these van Eyck paintings, researched about patrons."<ref name="BuchholZ" />

Harbison published a number of books on the Northern Renaissance and wrote extensively for such publications as ''[Art Quarterly](/source/Art_Quarterly)'', ''[The Art Bulletin](/source/The_Art_Bulletin)'', ''[Renaissance Quarterly](/source/Renaissance_Quarterly)'' and ''Simiolus''.<ref name="Umass" /> He wrote extensively on [Jan van Eyck](/source/Jan_van_Eyck), especially the painter's ''[Arnolfini Portrait](/source/Arnolfini_Portrait)''.<ref name="BuchholZ" />

==Publications==
* ''The Last Judgment in Sixteenth Century Northern Europe, A Study in the Relation between Art and the Reformation''. New York: Garland, 1975. {{ISBN|0-8240-1988-1}}
* Religious imagination and art- historical method: a reply to Barbara Lane's 'Sacred versus profane'. "Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art" 19, 3 (1989), 198- 205.
* ''Jan van Eyck, the Play of Realism''. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. {{ISBN|0-948462-79-5}}
* ''The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context''. New York: Abrams, 1995. {{ISBN|0-13-368549-7}} 
* ''The Art of the Northern Renaissance''. London: [Weidenfeld & Nicolson](/source/Weidenfeld_%26_Nicolson), 1995. {{ISBN|0297835122}}

===Sources===
{{reflist}}

{{Early Netherlandish painting}}

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Harbison, Craig}}
Category:1944 births
Category:2018 deaths
Category:American art historians
Category:University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
Category:Princeton University alumni
Category:Scholars of Netherlandish art

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Craig Harbison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Harbison) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Harbison?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.