CHARLES DEMPSEY

DEMPSEY--Charles. Charles Gates Dempsey, art historian and professor emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, died of a heart attack on February 22, 2022, at Georgetown University Hospital in the arms of his beloved wife of forty-six years Elizabeth Cropper, his soulmate and constant colleague. He is also survived by his two cherished daughters from a previous marriage, Martha and Kate (Tim Blair, Ella, and Grace). His precious son Adam Sell Dempsey (Kayoko) predeceased him. He was a loyal brother to Julia D. Parkinson (Watson, Edward, William) and Richard C. Dempsey (Peggy Begenisich, Lydia and Iris), and he embraced his extended family, cousins Penny and Jim Guest, and their children Ben and Betsey (Jeremy Belin and Elda). Charles had a gift for making enduring friendships around the world. Many of these flourished in Martha's Vineyard summers and Florentine springs, and he was enlivened by the company of students and colleagues wherever they were to be found. Born in Providence, RI, Charles Dempsey was the oldest child of Edward W. and Betsey Beach Dempsey. He was educated at Shady Hill School, Cambridge, and John Burroughs School, St. Louis, and graduated from Swarthmore College, receiving his M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. Charles served several terms as chair of the History of Art departments at Bryn Mawr College, where he taught for many years, and at Johns Hopkins University, from which he retired. He was, however, happiest in the library (especially, in later years, at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where he was a frequent and welcome guest), writing his deeply argued studies, and teaching new generations of scholars. He was a dedicated and inspiring supervisor of Ph.D. dissertations in Renaissance and Baroque Art in Italy and was tremendously proud of his former students. The Festschrift they published in his honor in 2012 (University of Toronto Press), was a source of great joy. Charles descended from several generations of professors and delighted in teaching. Deeply committed to equal opportunity, fairness, and social justice, he was honored to bear the name of Charles Beman Gates (brother-in-law of Rufus R. Dawes), who died at Harper's Ferry in 1864, aged nineteen. Charles Dempsey played a vital role in establishing Johns Hopkins's Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at the Villa Spelman in Florence as an intellectually lively and civilized international center for graduate students and scholars. He was a fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (on whose fellowship board he served), and of the American Academy in Rome. He contributed important essays to catalogues of historic exhibitions on Emilian Painting, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Giovan Pietro Bellori, and Botticelli, and deeply respected the work of museum colleagues in bringing scattered works of art together in public view. To paraphrase his words on Annibale Carracci: "works of art are impermanent, incomplete, but Annibale knew that an idea survives the destruction of its reflections. Annibale spent his life in ceaseless pursuit of the idea, recognizing that the intellectual creations of man are themselves one of Nature's highest manifestations." Whether at the National Gallery of Art, the Prado, the Uffizi, the National Gallery, London, or the Louvre, or in small museums and remote churches, especially in Italy, Charles was an indefatigable and passionate viewer of painting and sculpture, seeing no opposition between the study of meaning or context and the understanding of style or form. His visiting seminars, especially in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the College de France, at the Prado, and at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana opened minds and eyes to ways of thinking about the history of art as a dialogue with the entire culture of art as human expression. Charles Dempsey was one of the towering figures of the post-Panofsky generation in the History of Art, and a beacon in Italian and Neo-Latin studies. His work shifted the idea of Italian humanist art from Neo- Platonic philosophy to the cultural centrality of the vernacular, to urban festival and rituals of masking, the relationship between literary poetics and artistic style, art as therapy against the forces of the irrational. The subjects of his scholarship included Botticelli and pagan mythology, Donatello and archaic demons re-fashioned as "putti," the beginnings of the Carracci and the education of artists, the realism of Caravaggio, the poetics of Nicolas Poussin, the cosmology of Hieronymus Bosch, as well as the re-evaluation of the baroque art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia. Charles's scholarship made its impact slowly but powerfully, appropriate for work that never reached publication without years of meditation: its relevance has never been greater. Charles Dempsey's studies, including his investigation of Botticelli's Primavera in The Portrayal of Love, his Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of the Baroque Style, his contribution to Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, and many other essays have become canonical. He was writing about Nicolas Poussin and the theme of love for an exhibition in Lyons in the days before he died. Charles Dempsey was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences (in recognition of his contribution to Adriatic studies through bringing scholars from the former Yugoslavia into dialogue with international colleagues in Florence after a time of war). He suffered several health problems in his later years, but always with the dignity and stoicism that his friends loved. Charles never failed to provide support for his wife Elizabeth Cropper, with whom he coauthored the prize-winning Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting, and in the past two decades he found a scholarly home at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, of which Elizabeth was then Dean. He always paid and required respect for learning, hard work, and historical imagination. By temperament he was not given to loquaciousness or display, but was always frank, patient, and unfailingly kind, with an ironic smile and a dry wit. Contributions in Charles's memory may be sent to the Nature Conservancy of Maine, The Innocence Project, World Central Kitchen, or to any of the outstanding institutions with which he was fortunate to be associated.