Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, has announced the appointment of two new senior curators at the Getty Museum. 

Dr. Davide Gasparotto, director of the Galleria Estense in Modena, Italy, will become Senior Curator of Paintings, and Dr. Jeffrey B. Spier, an independent scholar and member of the Department of Classics at the University of Arizona, has been appointed to the position of Senior Curator of Antiquities. 

“I am thrilled to announce Dr. Gasparotto’s appointment as the Museum’s Senior Curator of Paintings,” says Potts. “He is a leading figure in the field of Renaissance through eighteenth-century Italian painting and sculpture, while also having an exceptionally broad knowledge of European art in other periods and media."

Davide Gasparotto is a native of Bassano del Grappa, Italy, who studied the History of Art and Classical Archaeology at the University of Pisa. He then went on to study the History of Art Criticism at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Gasparotto spent 12 years as a curator and art historian at the National Gallery of Parma. He was a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (2007), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011-2012) researching sixteenth-century Italian decorative arts before being appointed director of the Galleria Estense in Modena in September 2012. 

“It is an equal pleasure to welcome Jeffrey Spier to the Getty Villa, where he will play a critical role in our ambitious plans for its future,” says Potts. “As the Museum’s new Senior Curator of Antiquities, Dr. Spier brings a wealth of experience as a scholar, curator and connoisseur of classical art that positions him ideally to oversee both the planned expansion of the Villa scholars program to incorporate the classical world’s interaction with other ancient cultures and the reinstallation of the collection of Greek and Roman art along historical lines.” 

Spier earned his B.A. degree in Classical Archaeology at Harvard University and his D.Phil in classical Archaeology at Merton College, Oxford. He has held research and teaching positions at University College London, Oxford University, and most recently at the University of Arizona. 

For the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Spier curated the exhibition San Marco and Venice (1997). He was guest curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas in 2007 for the exhibition Picturing the Bible: the Earliest Christian Art(catalog published by Yale University Press, 2007). 

Spier has twice been a visiting scholar at the Getty Museum, most recently in 2013 when he studied at the Getty Villa. He has lectured and written extensively on Greek and Roman sculpture, painting, luxury arts, numismatics and archaeological method, covering eras from Archaic Greece to Byzantium. In his research, he has pursued a broad understanding of ancient art, primarily Greek, Roman and Byzantine, but also of the borders of the classical world, including Egypt and the Near East, Thrace, Scythia, Persia, Bactria and beyond. He is regarded as a leading expert in the study of Greek, Roman and Byzantine gems. 

Spier joins the Getty in September and will have his office at the Getty Villa in Malibu; Gasparotto will join the Getty in late 2014 and will have his office at the Getty Center