The Museum of the prestigious American University houses Late Medieval and Renaissance masterpieces
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hartarvard University has a group of three museums called Harvard Art Museums. In total the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum house approximately 250,000 objects. These range in date from antiquity to the present and come from all over the world. Among them, there are important works by many Italian artists. The majority of the Italian collection is in the _Fogg Museum.
_ It is the oldest and largest component of the Harvard Art Museums. Here, there are paintings and statues from different Italian regions and different historical moments, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
The Late Medieval Italian paintings that the Museum houses are by the Master of Offida, Master of Camerino, and Bernardo Daddi. Other artists of the same period whose works are on exhibition are Simone Martini, Luca di Tomme, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
Many are the works of Italian great masters, especially of the Italian Renaissance, the golden period for Italian art. The Italian Renaissance period paintings that are in the collection are by Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Gherardo Starnina. There are also works by Cosme Tura, Giovanni di Paolo, Lorenzo Lotto, Canaletto, and Orazio Gentileschi, father of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Moreover, the Fogg Museum holds a unique treasure, the world’s largest collection of terracotta models by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He used them to work out the forms to be rendered later on a larger scale in marble or bronze. These models allow scholars and enthusiasts to discover the sources of inspiration and the processes Bernini used to create his masterpieces. In fact, they are also used during the lessons, to allow Harvard University students to study closely the works of the most famous Roman artist of the 17th century.