Daniel Arasse

Daniel Arasse (1944 - 2003) is French Italianist art historian; Arasse graduated from the École normale supérieure in 1965 in Classics. He entered the Sorbonne initially studying Italian Renaissance art under André Chastel on St. Bernardino of Siena. He switched to École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) under the direction of Louis Marin. After the break up the University of Paris in 1968 under the cultural revolution, commonly known as the French May, Arasse taught at the Sorbonne University or Paris IV where he taught modern art history, i.e., fifteenth- to the nineteenth centuries, beginning in 1969. In 1971and then at Paris-I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. That year, too, he became a member of the French School in Rome for two years. Between 1982 and 1989, he directed the French Institute in Florence, creating the France Cinema Festival. He returned to the EHESS in 1993 as director of studies. He was appointed curator of the Musée du Luxembourg Botticelli in 2003, but succumbed to a degenerative disease at age 59 and died.