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M.A. candidate Andy Nicole Bowers has been awarded a Kress Language School Fellowship to study at the internationally acclaimed Middlebury Language Schools this summer. Funded by a generous gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the fellowship covers the comprehensive cost of Middlebury’s seven-week immersion program, annually enabling five graduate students in European art history or art conservation to rapidly gain proficiency in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish, with the ultimate aim of furthering their research and scholarship. 

As the 2020 Kress Fellow in Italian, Bowers, who focuses on the Southern Baroque, will develop language skills crucial to her research on representations of violence in seventeenth-century painting, a subject she hopes to continue pursuing at a doctoral level. Her immediate aim is to expand and refine her publishable paper on the overtly painted blood in Caravaggio’s otherwise highly illusionistic scenes of decapitation, especially his Head of Medusa (c. 1598). An extension of her work in Professor Monika Schmitter’s seminars “Caravaggio: Rebel Artist” and “After Mona Lisa: Portraits and Selves in Renaissance Italy”, this project led Bowers to visit Rome and Florence last July with a travel grant from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. 

Bowers is grateful for the support and encouragement she has received from her faculty and peers in the M.A. program and from Professor Arturo Figliola, of the Italian Studies Department, whose spring 2018 Intensive Elementary Italian course helped her not only to prepare for her translation exam but also to discover her enthusiasm for the Italian language and to get back in touch with her long-standing passion for language learning in general.