Dr. Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli

Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli is an art historian associated with the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. Her main fields of interest are Venetian painting and transcultural exchanges of Italian and Islamic art. She studied art history, archaeology and Arabic language at the Universities of Berlin, Würzburg and Venice and received her Ph.D. on the Sacra conversazione as a half-length composition in Venetian Renaissance Painting in 1988.  She has held fellowships at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice) and the Deutsches Studienzentrum (Venice) and the Kunsthistorisches Institut  (Florence). As a fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and in collaboration with the Procuratoria di San Marco in Venice, she published a volume on Tarsie lignee della basilica di San Marco (1998). She is the author of numerous articles on Venetian painting and on Islamic art in Venice. She collaborated at various exhibitions, such as Venice and the Islamic World (New York/Paris 2006-2008). Together with Gerhard Wolf, she edited the acts of the conference Islamic Artefacts in 2010 held at the Kunsthistroisches Institut in Florenz. With a grant of the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung she wrote the scientific catalog of fifteenth-century Venetian painting at the Gemäldegalerie SMPK in Berlin; the book was published with the title Giovanni Bellini e la pittura veneta nella Gemäldegalerie di Berlino (Verona - Scripta, 2015). In 2018 she contributed to the exhibition Islam e Firenze organized by Giovanni Curatola and Eike Schmidt at the Gallerie degli Uffizi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence. Her current projects include a monograph entitled Private collectors in Berlin, the birth of Renaissance taste as well as Bellini, Mantegna and Islamic art and on Mesopotamia in travel diaries and letters of the 19th century.