Rona Goffen

Rona Goffen (June 7, 1944 – September 8, 2004) was an American art historian who specialized in Italian Renaissance art. A professor at Princeton University, Duke University, Rutgers University, she published several books – including Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, Spirituality in Conflict (1988), Giovanni Bellini (1994), Titian's Women (1997), and Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael (2002) – and was a 1986 Guggenheim Fellow.

Biography Goffen was born on June 7, 1944, in Brooklyn, She obtained a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1966 and an MA from Columbia University in 1968.

Goffen's field was in the art of the Italian Renaissance, and she often gave focus to the socioeconomic background of the Renaissance art scene. In addition to a 1980 visiting professorship at Barnard College, she was the 1997 Robert Sterling Clark Visiting professor of Art History at Williams College. In 2005, Gabriele Neher said that "Goffen's prolific publishing record has established her as a key Italian Renaissance art historian in the twentieth century".