UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Daniel Zolli, assistant professor of art history and Agnes Scollins Carey early career professor in the arts, has been awarded the prestigious Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association (CAA) for his article “Making Up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act.”
Established in 1957, the Porter Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished article published in the Art Bulletin during the previous year by a scholar who is under the age of 35 or who has received a doctorate within the past 10 years.
“Making up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act,” is a meticulous investigation of Donatello’s sculptural practice and is grounded in a fine-grained reconstruction of how the artist deployed knowledge of multiple trades for his experiments with unconventional materials, according to the committee that juried the prize.
The citation accompanying the award continued:
“Zolli deftly embeds Donatello’s material masquerades within accounts of cosmetic artistry, and above all cosmetic deception, across the popular, theatrical, commercial, artisanal, and spiritual worlds of fifteenth-century Florence. By interweaving the technical and the discursive in elegant prose, Zolli links Donatello’s often subversive use of mediums with his viewers’ everyday anxieties over transgressions between artifice and substance, illusion and truth. In so doing, Zolli’s narrative of surface dissimulations provides our field with a model for conceiving of surfaces as dually motivated by material and social contingencies. For art historians, surfaces have long acted as repositories of meaning; in this prize-winning essay, Zolli moves beyond ornament and decoration to probe the significance of the very act of application.”
One of CAA’s longest-running awards, the Porter Prize seeks to encourage high scholarly standards among younger members of the profession. It has been awarded to superb articles in Western European art and architecture but has increasingly recognized a wider range of topics (in American, Chinese, Japanese and Assyrian art) since the 1990s.
“The Art Bulletin is among the most prestigious international venues for art-historical research, and Dan Zolli’s article is a work of exemplary scholarship. Both learned and readable, it will likely become a point of reference in Renaissance Art History and deserves the recognition of this esteemed award,” said Robin Thomas, head of the Department of Art History. “I speak for all of my colleagues in saying how very proud the department is.”
Zolli is a scholar of early modern art, with a focus on the art of Southern Europe from 1300 to 1600. His research interests include the materials and techniques of art; worksites and workshop practice; art’s theorization in oral tradition and popular folklore; and its entanglements with colonialism, law, and the environment. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2017.
Zolli was recognized at the 2024 CAA Annual Conference at the Convocation reception in February.