Bénédicte Gady

Bénédicte Gady
Period: 2006-2007
Profession: Art historian Born in 1972, a graduate of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (“Sciences-Po”), Bénédicte Gady devoted her early art-historical research to the study of artistic relations between France and Italy in the 17th century through, on the one hand, the critical fortune of Pierre de Cortone (articles published in the exhibition catalog and proceedings of the Pietro da Cortona symposium in Rome in 1997, and in the Revue du Louvre in May 2002), and, secondly, French prints after Italian painters (catalog published online at www.e-stampe.com; essays presented in Studiolo in 2002 and in Nouvelles de l’estampe in March 2005). Her doctoral thesis on Charles Le Brun and his collaborators, currently in progress at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, has enabled her to analyze the decors of the main 17th-century galleries in Paris and Versailles (first published in La Galerie d’Apollon au palais du Louvre, 2004). At the Villa Medici, where she stayed from April 2005 to September 2006, she studied their Roman counterparts in order to propose a comparative study of this type of large-scale decoration in France and Italy in the mid-Seicento. Since 2002, she has also been involved in preparing the complete critical edition of the lectures given by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in the 17th and 18th centuries (German Center for Art History, Paris).