David Freedberg

David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, United States. He was Director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London from July 2015 to April 2017.

Born in South Africa, David Freedberg was educated at South African College High School in Newlands, Cape Town (1961–65), the University of Cape Town (1966), completed a Bachelor of Arts at Yale (1966–69), and accomplished the D.Phil. degree in Balliol College, Oxford (1969–73).

He taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art before moving to Columbia in 1984. He has also been Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford (1983–4) and Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art (1996–8). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Accademia Nazionale di Agricultura and the Istituto Veneto per le Scienze, Lettere e Arti.

David Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. He first investigated this topic in Iconoclasts and Their Motives, 1984, which was followed by the landmark book, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989 and in several subsequent editions in many languages.

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