BOSTON, MASS.- Dr. Nathaniel Silver was recently promoted to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Associate Curator of the Collection.

For two years at the Museum as Assistant Curator of the Collection, Silver co-curated the acclaimed exhibitions Beyond Words: Italian Renaissance Books and Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice, and contributed to Off the Wall: Gardner and Her Masterpieces. Silver was also involved in accompanying digital projects, leading the development of a web resource for Crivelli that won acclaim from the NEH, AAM MUSE and NEMA. In addition, he supervised - and continues to oversee - the collections component of a museum wide digitization project that aims to make over 15,000 objects accessible online. In addition, he contributed to several museum publications, co-authoring the forthcoming museum guidebook and leading the recent re-publication of The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

During the same period, Silver co-organized the international conference Piero della Francesca and Disegno (Courtauld Institute, London, 2015) and served as a moderator for Purity and Contamination in Renaissance Art and Architecture (MIT, Boston, 2016). He delivered public lectures at the Gardner and elsewhere including the Centro di Studi Tedeschi (Venice, 2016), the University of Nebraska (Omaha, 2016), and the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Berlin, 2015). Silver also published articles in the peer-reviewed journals I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (2015) and the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz (2016). His other recent publications include a short piece on Gardner's collecting for Apollo Magazine and regular exhibition and book reviews for The Burlington Magazine.

In his enhanced role as Associate Curator, Silver will spearhead a new annual program entitled Close Up, shedding new a single work of art in the permanent collection through in-gallery presentations, lectures and publications. He will be lead curator on future exhibition projects, including those focusing on Fra Angelico and Botticelli. In addition, he will also supervise conservation campaigns and continue to lead the on-going collection digitization project.

Before joining the Museum, Silver worked for three years at The Frick Collection where he curated the exhibition Piero della Francesca in America. He has also served as the Edmond J. Safra Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and held fellowships at the Kunsthistoriches Institut in Florence and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.

Silver received his MA and Ph.D. from the University of London, writing his dissertation on the career of the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Francesco Pesellino.