Starting my sophomore year of college, I took one art history course per semester. They were taught by a brilliant and talented woman named Barbara Harris, who worked with the previously mentioned Arno Maris. I was fortunate to have had Ms. Harris as an instructor, because she left Westfield State College the semester that I graduated.
I never considered a career in art history, but I loved art and I enjoyed the contrast it offered to regular history classes, which are mostly about politics and war. Everybody automatically thinks of Italy when they hear the word “Renaissance,” but my favorite course was about Flemish Renaissance art. (Flemish as in Flanders, as in Belgium.) Today’s Boston Globe has a story about an Italian Renaissance painting undergoing restoration at the Museum of Fine Arts.