Daniel Zolli (PhD, 2017), who is currently Assistant Professor of Art History and Agnes Scollins Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts at the PennState College of Arts and Architecture has been awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association for his article, “Making Up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act.”
The jury wrote:
“In “Making up Materials: Donatello and the Cosmetic Act,” Daniel M. Zolli’s meticulous investigation of Donatello’s sculptural practice demonstrates that makeup is more than skin deep. The essay is grounded in a fine-grained reconstruction of how the artist deployed knowledge of multiple trades for his experiments with unconventional materials. 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.”
The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize was established in 1957, in memory of a founding member of the CAA and one of the first American scholars of the discipline. This award seeks to encourage high scholarly standards among younger members of the profession. The prize is awarded for a distinguished article published in The Art Bulletin during the previous year by a scholar who is under the age of thirty-five or who has received the doctorate not more than ten years before acceptance of the article for publication. One of CAA’s longest-running awards, the Porter prize 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.