Elizabeth Cropper awarded I Tatti Mongan Prize

Elizabeth Cropper, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and president of the Renaissance Society of America, has been awarded the I Tatti Mongan Prize.

The prize, in honor of Agnes and Elizabeth Mongan, was founded by a gift from Melvin Seiden ’52, LL.B. ’55, in 1986. It is given to a scholar of Italian Renaissance art, French art, drawings, and connoisseurship who carries into a new generation the qualities of imaginative scholarship, personal generosity, and devotion to the institutions of art history that were exemplified in their own generation by Agnes and Elizabeth Mongan.

Elizabeth Cropper received a B.A. from Cambridge University, England, and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. She has been a professor at Johns Hopkins University since 1985.

Agnes Mongan (1905-96) was a distinguished curator and connoisseur of drawings ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the 19th and 20th centuries in France. Among her many positions, she served as curator of drawings at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and then as director from 1969 to 1971. Elizabeth Mongan (1910-2002) was a connoisseur of prints and drawings and the first curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection, the finest collection of prints then in private hands.