by Jon Lackman | 21 March 2008 | Renaissance
Art historian Irma B. Jaffe, 91, is still publishing, which is fortunate, considering that her career, according to the Columbia University alumni newsletter,
didn’t begin until almost mid-life: she left the University of Illinois when she was eighteen years old, in her sophomore year, to get married. Twenty years later, the day after she sent her daughter off to Radcliffe College, she went “back to school,” entering Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She and her daughter received their undergraduate degrees one day apart because Radcliffe’s graduation was held the day after Columbia’s.
In her latest book, “Zelotti’s Epic Frescoes at Cataio: The Obizzi Saga” (Fordham University Press), she reconsiders a forgotten 16th-century painter. From the New York Times:
Giovanni Battista Zelotti was so well regarded that he was handpicked by Titian to work in the Ducal Palace in Venice alongside Paolo Veronese. But the cracks of history can be brutal, randomly consigning artists to posthumous indifference … “Janson’s History of Art” omits Zelotti altogether … It didn’t help that until recently one of Zelotti’s greatest achievements — a cycle of 40 frescoes here at the so-called Castle of Cataio, about nine miles from Padua — was off limits to visitors … [until heirs decided in] the mid-1990s … Fresco by fresco, Ms. Jaffe explains the genesis of the heroic gestures, gory battles and sumptuous ceremonies depicted in the cycle, which was commissioned to celebrate the long history of the noble Obizzi family, dating to 1004 … The fresco cycle, begun by Zelotti and assistants in 1572 in six rooms of the castle, was inspired by the account of Giuseppe Betussi, a poet who had been hired just before they were painted to record the Obizzi family history. Betussi used what Ms. Jaffe calls “poetic license,” depicting Obizzi family members as protagonists of historical events with no evidence that they actually witnessed them … The frescoes are in excellent condition and have not undergone any major restorations.
