Christopher M. S. Johns

Christopher M. S. Johns (born April 13, 1955) is an American art historian, and the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, who specializes in eighteenth-century Italian art, decorative art, material culture, and architecture.He is the leading scholar on early modern Italian art and culture, especially the relationship between art, politics, and religion.

Johns received his BA from Florida State University where he majored in art history and history. He received his MA and PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. He began his teaching career at the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of art history in 1985. He has been the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University since 2003.

He was a member of the organizing committees for the exhibitions "The Splendor of Eighteenth-Century Rome" (Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2000) and "Art of the Gesù: Bernini and His Age" (Fairfield Museum of Art, 2018), and a member of the consultative committee for the exhibition "Pompeo Batoni" (Palazzo Ducale, Lucca, Italy, 2008-2009).

Recognition of his academic achievements includes numerous visiting professorships, scholarly residences, invitations to lecture in universities and museums around the world, awards and fellowships, most notably from the American Academy in Rome, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, and the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Numerous leading scholars have reviewed Johns’s books as impactful contributions to such diverse fields as history of early-modern Italian culture, art, and architecture; history of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order, and Asian art history. In her review of The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment, Wendy Wassyng Roworth wrote that this “groundbreaking" work is "the first comprehensive study to illustrate how progressive papal policies and institutional reforms in the eighteenth century had a direct impact on the visual arts and design.” June Hargrove has called Johns’s book Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe an “instructive study of Canova, his art, and its political context” and “an indispensable history of patronage” that has made “our understanding of the artist and his art … ever the richer.” John Pinto wrote that Johns’s first monograph, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI, is an important contribution to the history of art and to the study of eighteenth-century Rome.”

Through his continuing scholarship, teaching, and service to the discipline, he has been a central figure in transforming the field of eighteenth-century art. He was a founding member of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture and the president of the organization from 1994 to 2001.