Gabriele Finaldi | |
|---|---|
 Finaldi in 2023 | |
| Director of the National Gallery | |
| Assumed office 17 August 2015 | |
| Preceded by | Sir Nicholas Penny |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 28 November 1965 Barnet,London |
| Education | Dulwich College |
| Alma mater | Courtauld Institute of Art |
| Occupation | |
| Awards |  Knight Bachelor |
Sir Gabriele Maria Finaldi (born 28 November 1965) is a British art historian and curator, with Italian citizenship. [1] Since August 2015, he has been director of the National Gallery in London, England. [2]
Finaldi was born in Barnet and raised in Catford in south London, the son of a Neapolitan father and a half-Polish-half-English mother. [3] He was educated at Dulwich College before studying art history at The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he completed his BA degree in 1987, an MA in 1989 and a PhD in 1995. [4] His doctoral research focused on the 17th-century Spanish Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera. [5]
Finaldi has curated exhibitions in the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium and has written catalogues and scholarly articles on Velázquez and Zurbarán, on Italian Baroque painting, on religious iconography, and on Picasso. [6]
Finaldi was a curator at the National Gallery between 1992 and 2002. He was responsible for the later Italian paintings in the collection (Caravaggio to Canaletto) and the Spanish collection (Bermejo to Goya). [6] In 2002 he was appointed Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain. [7] At the Prado he oversaw the project to build a new extension in 2007, the creation of the Research Centre, and curated major exhibitions on Ribera (in 2011) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (in 2012). [8]
On 17 August 2015, Finaldi returned to the National Gallery having been appointed its director. [9]
Finaldi was knighted in the 2025 New Year Honours for services to art and culture. [10]
The Courtauld Institute of Art, commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist colleges for the study of the history of art in the world and is known for the disproportionate number of directors of major museums drawn from its small body of alumni.
Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish painter and printmaker. Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and the singular Diego Velázquez, are regarded as the major artists of Spanish Baroque painting. Referring to a series of Ribera exhibitions held in the late 20th century, Philippe de Montebello wrote "If Ribera's status as the undisputed protagonist of Neapolitan painting had ever been in doubt, it was no longer. Indeed, to many it seemed that Ribera emerged from these exhibitions as not simply the greatest Neapolitan artist of his age but one of the outstanding European masters of the seventeenth century." Jusepe de Ribera has also been referred to as José de Ribera, Josep de Ribera, and was called Lo Spagnoletto by his contemporaries and early historians.
The Courtauld Gallery is an art museum in Somerset House, on the Strand in central London. It houses the collection of the Samuel Courtauld Trust and operates as an integral part of the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso. Spanish art was particularly influenced by France and Italy during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain, and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.
Sir Nicholas Beaver Penny is a British art historian. From 2008 to 2015 he was director of the National Gallery in London.
Sir John Denis Mahon, was a British collector and historian of Italian art. Considered to be one of the few art collectors who was also a respected scholar, he is generally credited, alongside Sacheverell Sitwell and Tancred Borenius, with bringing Italian pre-Baroque and Baroque painters to the attention of English-speaking audiences, reversing the critical aversion to their work that had prevailed from the time of John Ruskin.
Michael William Lely Kitson was a British art historian who became an international authority on the work of the painter Claude Lorrain.
Ian Lorne Campbell is a Scottish art historian and curator. Campbell was Beaumont Senior Research Curator at the National Gallery, London from 1996 to 2012, and from 1974 to 1996 lectured on the Northern Renaissance at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has curated major exhibitions at the National Gallery and other museums, including ones on Rogier van der Weyden at Leuven in 2009 and the Prado in 2015.
Jonathan Mayer Brown was an American art historian, known for his work on Spanish art, particularly Diego Velázquez. He was Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at New York University.
Tarnya Cooper is an art historian and author who is currently the National Trust's Curatorial & Collections Director.
Robert Nicholas Cullinan is an art historian and curator. On 6 January 2015, he was appointed the 12th director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a post he began several months later. It was announced on 28 March 2024 that he had been appointed Director of the British Museum.
The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels is a 1651 painting of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's Italian art collection by the Flemish Baroque painter David Teniers the Younger, now held in the Prado in Madrid.
Enriqueta Harris Frankfort was a British art historian and writer who specialised in Spanish art. Born into a family with an English father and a Spanish mother, she attended the University College London to read modern languages and later studied a Doctor of Philosophy art degree under Tancred Borenius. Harris travelled to Spain to research Caravaggio's influence on 17th-century Spanish paintings and her first book was published in 1938. She billeted Basque child refugees during the Spanish Civil War and worked with the Ministry of Information to keep Spain neutral during World War II. After the war ended she worked in the Warburg Institute and was offered the post in their photographic collection in 1947. Harris worked there until her retirement albeit for two years when she was married to the institution's director Henri Frankfort. Her work on Spanish paintings earned her widespread recognition in the country and received multiple awards and honours.
The Finding of Moses is an early 1630s painting by Orazio Gentileschi. There are two versions, the prime version is in The National Gallery in London and the second is in Museo del Prado in Madrid.
Luke Syson is an English museum curator and art historian. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, prior to which he held positions at the British Museum (1991–2002), the Victoria and Albert Museum (2002–2003), the National Gallery (2003–2012) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015–2019). In 2011 he curated the acclaimed Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery: Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, which included his pivotal role in the controversial authentication by the National Gallery of da Vinci's Salvator Mundi.
William Bryan Jordan Jr. was an American art historian who facilitated acquisitions, curated exhibitions, and authored publications on Spanish artists and still life paintings, particularly from the Golden Age.
Caroline Campbell is an international art museum curator. Since November 2022, she is director of the National Gallery of Ireland, being the first woman taking this position in the Gallery’s 158 year history.
Bruce Ambler Boucher FSA is an American art historian and curator. He is Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane's Museum, London and emeritus professor of the History of Art at University College London (UCL).
Justus Lange is a German art historian and curator, known for his work with Old Masters, and a curator at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel, Germany.
