BOSTON, MASS.- Dr. Nathaniel Silver, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Associate Curator of the Collection, recently received the I Tatti Prize for Best Essay by a Junior Scholar from Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Center.

The biannual prize is awarded to a junior scholar for the best scholarly article published in the center’s journal. Dr. Silver’s essay, titled ”Creating a Renaissance Painter: Pesellino, Connoisseurship, and the Romantik,” (I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 18, No. 2), explores art historians’ process of creating the canon of Renaissance art through the lens of the Florentine painter il Pesellino (1422-1457). Silver looks closely at art historians such as William Young Ottley, Giovanni Morelli, and Bernard Berenson and their research that shaped Pesellino’s modern identity.

Dr. Silver’s scholarly research focuses on Italian art, and he has published on various topics including Pesellino's historiography, trecento Venetian churches and their altarpieces, Piero della Francesca, Piermatteo d'Amelia's rediscovery, and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection.

In February, Dr. Silver is curating Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth at the Gardner Museum, the sole venue for the show, which reunites Angelico’s four reliquaries for the church of Santa Maria Novella.

In 2016, he co-curated Beyond Words: Italian Renaissance Books, the Gardner Museum’s contribution to a city-wide Renaissance books exhibition for which he won an "Outstanding Exhibition" award from the Association of Art Museum Curators. In 2015, he co-organized Ornament & Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice at the Gardner Museum. In 2013, Silver curated Piero della Francesca in America at The Frick Collection.