John K. G. Shearman

John Kinder Gowran Shearman (pronounced "Sherman"; 24 June 1931 – 11 August 2003 ) was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, described by his colleague James S. Ackerman as "the leading scholar of Italian Renaissance painting", who published several influential works, but whose expected major book on Quattrocento painting, for the Pelican History of Art (commissioned in 1984, and still a gap in the series in 2019), never appeared. However, what is widely acknowledged as his most influential book, on the concept of Mannerism, published in 1967, is still in print.

Early life and education Born in 1931 to Charles E. G. Shearman, a British army brigadier, and Evelyn Shearman (née White) in Aldershot, Hampshire, John Shearman was educated in Surrey at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, and Felsted School in Essex. After completing his two year National Service in Germany, he took up a place at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1951 at the invitation of Samuel Courtauld, who he had met while on a school trip to London; Shearman’s interest in art and architecture having been stimulated by his father, a keen amateur artist, and his grandfather, Ernest Charles Shearman, a respected British ecclesiastical architect. although some believed it was Shearman’s close association with Blunt, already falling out of favour, that thwarted this aspiration. After his death, his library, containing substantial resources on Renaissance and Baroque art including about 200 books on Raphael, was bequeathed to the Courtauld.

Five years after his failure to become Director of the Courtauld Institute Shearman returned to Princeton, where he was chair of the art and archaeology department from 1979. Shearman moved to Harvard University in 1987 as professor of fine arts and, in 1989, he received the William Dorr Boardman Professorship becoming chair of the Fine Arts Department from 1990 to 1993. In 1994, until his retirement in 2002, he was Charles Adams University Professor.

Often involved in identifying and conserving works of art, Shearman worked with the Italian and Vatican authorities on issues including the damage after the 1966 Flood of the River Arno in Florence serving on the Pontifical Advisory Commission.

In 2001, he identified an Andrea del Sarto altarpiece that had been lost for 350 years. making reference to Shearman’s love of sailing, was published in 2001 with contributions from no fewer than fifty-three of his students,

Honours 1976 Fellow of the British Academy

1979 The Serena Medal for Italian Studies, British Academy

1979 Fellow Accademia del Disegno, Florence

1983 Bronze Medal of the Collège de France

1994 The Charles Rufus Morey Award for his book Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance

1995 Fellow Accademia si San Luca, Rome interested in yacht and dinghy sailing, in 2003.

Publications His publications include:

Andrea del Sarto Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965 Mannerism, London, Penguin/Baltimore, MD, 1967 Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. London: Phaidon, 1972; edited, and Hirst, Michael. Wilde, Johannes. The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decorations. British Academy Italian Lecture 1971. London: Oxford University Press, 1972 Michelangelo: Six Lectures. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983 Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, A. W. Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts 1988 Bollingen Series 35, 37. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992 Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483–1602, 2003, Yale University Press, (Updated edition)