UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 38, Page 10
August 5, 1993
Art history grad students honored

     Three University graduate students in art history, Judith Freda,
Catherine Herbert and Paula Warrick, have received highly competititve
pre-doctoral fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
     It is rare for one university to have students win in all three
categories of the foundation's fellowship program, according to William I.
Homer, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Art History and chairperson of the
department.

     Freda, who has bachelor's and master's degrees from Bryn Mawr College,
has been awarded a two-year research fellowship. Only four such fellowships
at foreign institutions are awarded by Kress. She will be at the
Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte in Munich, while conducting research
for her dissertation. She will study a 9th-century, medieval gospel book,
executed for Charlemagne as a Christmas gift, interpreting the decorations
of the lavishly illustrated manuscripts and how they relate to Christian
and classical imagery.

     A graduate of Cornell University with a master's degree from the
University of Pennsylvania, Herbert, who previously won a Jacob K. Javits
Fellowship, will study monumental high crosses in Ireland. Herbert received
a Kress travel fellowship, one of the 15 to 20 awarded each year.
     Carved with scenes of vegetation and human and animal figures, the
large free-standing crosses, dating back to the Middle Ages, are scattered
throughout the Irish countryside. For her dissertation, Herbert is engaged
in unraveling the symbolism of the crosses, which she believes are related
to Christian imagery, although some of the carvings are seemingly secular
or pagan in design.

     Warrick, a graduate of the College of William and Mary with a master's
degree from the University of Virginia, has been awarded one of 10 Kress
dissertation fellowships and will spend a year conducting research in
Paris.
     Her topic is the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(1780-1867). During the Napoleonic era and the decades that followed,
Ingres not only painted the emperor, but also portraits of the civil
servants and their families. Warrick intends to study these portraits of
the civil servants within the context of the society they represented,
interpreting the poses, gestures and expressions as well as the external
symbols of clothing and environment.
     She will concentrate on the portraits of the family of Charles
Marcotte d'Argenteuil. Letters and papers related to the family are
available in archives, and the portraits are in scattered locations in
Paris.

     "These awards are a fitting tribute to the excellence of the students
we train and of our graduate program. We are proud of this recognition of
our students' accomplishments in a rigorous national competition," Homer
said.
                                        -Sue Swyers Moncure