The College Art Association has awarded its top museum catalogue prize, the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, to CODART member Maryan Ainsworth for Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

Maryan W. Ainsworth (editor and principal author), Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press) 2010 is a “summa” of Maryan Ainsworth’s decades-long exploration of the artistic legacy of this place and time. Using a variety of methods—technical analysis, connoisseurship, archival research, biography, iconography, and sustained attention to each object—she and the other authors place Gossart at the center of a rich world of intertwined relationships. Together they reveal the artist’s groundbreaking engagement with Rome and antiquity, his intent study of architecture and sculpture, his carefully crafted experimentation in a variety of media, and his amazing versatility as a painter of religious scenes, mythological subjects, and innovative portraits over a long career. The book is also significant for the insightful way in which it situates Gossart among his contemporaries, including the painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, the sculptor Conrad Meit, and the patron and connoisseur Philip of Burgundy.