The Barberini Tapestries: Woven Monuments of Baroque Rome

The featured tapestries were once displayed at St Peter’s Basilica and in the Sistine Chapel, and were the subject of an intense conservation effort which restored these works of art after a fire in 2001 burnt two of them and damaged four more.

James Harper is a Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the University of Oregon (USA). He trained at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a former fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Harper is the author/editor of The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye: Visual Imagery before Orientalism, 1450-1750 (2011) and co-author of Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour (2010). Marlene Eidelheit is the Director and Chief Conservator of the Textile Conservation Laboratory at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With a degree in textile and costume conservation from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), her early training included work on tapestries and textiles in Italy, as well as at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and at the Museum of Natural History, New York. She works on material ranging from archaeological weaving to modern textile art.