Art Historian and scholar of Sicilian art and decorative arts, Director, Museo Nazionale di Messina (1949-1966). Maria Accascina was born in Naples in 1898 to a family originally from Palermo. Accascina moved to her family’s city, Palermo, to study Literature. After graduation she went to the Regia Scuola di Perfezionamento in Storia dell’Arte Medievale e Moderna dell’Università di Roma. At this time, she studied under Adolfo Venturi who assisted her with her thesis on medieval goldsmithing.

Art critic and historian of Italian renaissance. Cartwright was the daughter of Richard Aubrey Cartwright and Mary Fremantle (Cartwright) (d. 1885). She was privately schooled. Her earliest exposure to art may have come from her uncle William Cornwallis Cartwright (d.1915), an art collector, who allowed her early access to his library and gallery at Aynhoe, Northamptonshire. She toured France, Austria, and Italy with her family in 1868.

Scholar of Dutch baroque art; professor of History of Art, UC Berkeley,1962-1994; exponent of the "new art history." Born Svetlana Leontief, she graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in 1957. She married the following year, assuming her husband's surname of Alpers. She continued graduate work in art history at Harvard University publishing an article on Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphrasis) in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, which announced her innovative approach to art history.

Scottish author and art theorist and connoisseur.  Anstruther-Thomson was born into an aristocratic family; her father was John Anstruther-Thomson of Charleton and Carntyne (1818-1904), and mother Caroline Maria Agnes Robina Hamilton-Gray (Anstruher-Thomson) (1833-?). Independently wealthy, she pursued a career first as an artist studying at the Slade School of Art and that in Paris under Carolus Duran until 1889.

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean.

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean. Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 where she completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in 1978. She also trained in visual arts at the Jamaica School of Art from 1979 to 1982, receiving a diploma in painting. She went on to receive a M. Phil in Cultural History (1983-1987). She later gained her M.A.

New York Times critic, professor at Cooper Hewitt and scholar of the New York School of art. Aston was the daughter of Ralph Neil Ashton and Sylvia Smith Shapiro (Ashton). Her father was a medical doctor. She obtained a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1949, continuing for an M.A. at Harvard University the following year. Ashton began her career as associate editor of the magazine Art Digest, published in New York beginning in 1951. She married Adja Yunkers (d.1983), an artist, in 1953.

Askew's father was the art historian Arthur K. McComb and mother Constance Atwood. She was born while her father was teaching art history at Vassar. Her parents were divorced when she was young and her step father, the art dealer R. Kirk Askew (1903-1974), adopted her. Askew grew up in New York City. As a college student, she majored in English at Vassar College. Her A.M. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University was completed in 1951.

Artist and art historian. Auerbach grew up in an educated Jewish family in Frankfurt. Her mother was the painter, Emma Kehrmann (1867-1958). She studied art history between 1917-24 at the universities in Frankfurt, Bonn and Munich, under Rudolf Kautzsch and Heinrich Wölfflin. Her 1925 Frankfurt dissertation, under Kautzsch, focused on 16th-century German portraiture in Franken, Schwaben and Bavaria. She taught at Frankfurter Volksbildungsheim (1925-33).

Art historian of Italian renaissance. Auerbach studied art history in Hamburg with the so-called Hamburg School art historians Charles de Tolnay, Fritz Saxl, Aby M. Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. She wrote her dissertation under Panofsky on Andrea del Sarto in 1932. She married one of the first Bauhaus school students, the sculptor and graphic artist Johannes Auerbach (changed to John Allenby in England,1900-1950) and immigrated to England in 1938.

Medieval art scholar and chair of Department of Art, Wellesley College; influential in1920s-30s. Avery graduated from Wellesley in 1891 majoring in Greek. She taught Greek and Latin briefly before moving to the University of the State of New York, Albany. She was employed in the library system at Albany, organizing the first traveling library and working on a bachelors in library science which she received in 1895. While a librarian organizing pictures for schools and clubs, she became interested in art.

Author, art scholar, cinema critic, and translator; wife pupil of the art historian Roberto Longhi. Banti was born Lucia Lopresti. Her father, a lawyer for the railways, Luigi-Vincenzo, was an avid literature enthusiast and her mother was Gemma Benin, both of them of Calabrian background. She attended the Liceo Tasso di Roma (a lyceum or high school), where in 1914 she encountered the young art historian (and future husband) Roberto Longhi.

Etruscan specialist. Banti worked at the Vatican Library between 1930 and 1940 and on the excavations at Crete before her appointment to the University of Rome in the history of religions. In 1948 she was appointed chair of archaeology at the University of Pavia, moving two years later to Florence to teach Etruscan studies, 1950-65 [Archivio biografico italiano states 1954-74]. She also lectured at various American universities during this time. In 1965 she became director of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi, which she held until 1972.

Vassar faculty member from 1931 to 1968 known for lectures on 14th and 15th century Italian painters; led Vassar College wartime defense program during WWII. Barber was raised in Chicago, IL. She graduated with a B.A. from Bryn Mawr in philosophy and psychology while she studying under famed medievalist and art historian Georgiana Goddard King. She received an M.A. in art history from Radcliffe in medieval sculpture and Renaissance painting, continuing graduate work at Radcliffe until 1931.

First female professor at La Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; known for publishing an authoritative monograph on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. Barocchi grew up spending time in her family's goldsmith shop in Florence, Italy, near the Ponte Vecchio, which she admitted helped refine her aesthetic sense of experiencing the world as a visual field (Passerini).

Specialist in Spanish painting;;curator of painting at Louvre Museum; co-authored the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte volume on eighteenth-century art with Harald Keller.

Wife of Bernard Berenson and scholar of Italian paintings. Mary Berenson was born Mary Smith to Robert Pearsall Smith (1827-1899), an evangelizing preacher and Hannah Whitall (Smith) (1832-1911), both of Quaker extraction. She was given the nick-name "Mariechen" (little Mary) by a German nursemaid. She attended Smith College and Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College). At Harvard Annex she met the Scots-Irish Benjamin Francis Conn "Frank" Costelloe (1855-1899). The future barrister and political reformer and Smith married in 1885.

Kurt Badt student, Cezanne scholar.

Archaeologist and art historian of ancient theater. Bieber was the daughter of Jacob Heinrich Bieber, a factory owner, and Valli Bukofzer (Bieber). She was born in Schönau, Kreis Schwetz, Prussia, which is present-day Przechowo, Kreis Swiece, Poland. In 1899 she was privately tutored in Berlin, receiving her Abitur. In Berlin she studied under Hermann Diels (1848-1922), Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), and Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz.

Art patronage scholar of XVIII c. Holland.

Early Warburg Institute developer and Director. Bing's parents were Moritz Bing and Emma Jonas (Bing). After attending the Lyceum in Hamburg, 1909-1913 and receiving an abitur from the Heinrich-Hertz Realgymnasium in 1916, she attended the universities of Munich and then Hamburg concentrating in philosophy. Her dissertation, written under Ernst Cassirer in 1921, focused on Lessing and Leibniz.

Scholar of Renaissance art and its relationship to classical antiquity and Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College. Pray was the daughter of Melvin Francis Pray and Lea Arlene Royer (Pray), of French-Canadian ancestry. She graduated from Cape Elizabeth High School in Portland in 1937, continuing to Wellesley College in where she received a B. A. in 1941 (majored in art and minored in Greek).