MIL-OSI United Kingdom: Patricia Rubin appointed as Trustee of The National Gallery

Patricia Rubin 

Appointed from 29th November 2024 to 28th November 2028

Patricia Rubin is an art historian, professor, and administrator. In addition to her decades-long teaching career in London and New York, she has been Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and founding Head of the Courtauld Institute Research Forum (2004-9), Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (2009-17), and Acting Director of Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies/Villa I Tatti in Florence (1997). She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Courtauld Institute. Museum-based education and research have been fundamental to her work. She has been involved as co-curator, consultant, and catalogue contributor to numerous exhibitions and served on museum boards and committees at the Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library and Museum, and the Galleria dell’Accademia of Venice.

She has written books on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and on art and society in Renaissance Florence (Giorgio Vasari: Art and History and Images and Identity in Fifteenth-century Florence), along with numerous essays and articles on related topics, including the co-authorship of the National Gallery exhibition catalogue Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s. Her research interests range from altarpiece design to humbug and art history in the nineteenth century. She has recently written essays on Sandro Botticelli’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Anglo-American viewing of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, tomb sculptures by Michelangelo Buonarroti and Andrea del Verrocchio (“Michelangelo’s Monkey and the Melancholy of Death”), “‘Perverse Images’: Monstrous Beauty and Monkey Business in Italian Art from Botticelli to Bronzino,” and “Dangerous Liaisons: Compromising Positions and Provocative Allusions in Bronzino’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence.”

Remuneration and Governance Code

Trustees of The National Gallery are not remunerated. This appointment has been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Patricia Rubin has declared no significant political activity.