Art World

Ashley M. Patton is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History and holds a minor in Early Modern Studies. Her research interests include early modern Italian sculpture, gender, religion, and materiality. Her dissertation project, titled "Tangible Women: Marble Sculptures of Female Saints in Seventeenth-Century Rome," explores the construction of early modern gender in post-Tridentine Rome by examining how sculptors employed different typologies of white marble sculpture in sacred spaces to present archetypal, yet largely inimitable models of the early modern, ideal Christian woman. She is also interested in the global impact of early modern Catholicism, including the trans-Atlantic relationships between Italy and the Americas in the seventeenth century. Ashley is currently the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern in the department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum as a Gra