Roberta Olson

Roberta Jeanne Marie Olson (born 1947) is an American historian of art. She is the author of many books on art history and is known for her work on Italian art, on astronomy in art, and on the ornithological illustrations of John James Audubon.

Education and career

Olson has a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. Her 1975 doctoral dissertation was Studies in the Later Works of Sandro Botticelli.

She taught at Wheaton College (Massachusetts) for 25 years; after retiring as professor emerita, she became curator of drawings at the New-York Historical Society in 2000.

Books

Olson's books include:

• Italian Drawings 1780–1890 (Indiana University Press, 1980)
• Fire and Ice: A History of Comets in Art (Walker & Co., 1985)
• Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting (edited, American Federation of the Arts, 1992)
• Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Thames & Hudson, 1992)
• Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science (with Jay Pasachoff, Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• The Florentine Tondo (Oxford University Press, 2000)
• The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy (edited with Patricia Reilly and Rupert Shepherd, Blackwell, 2006)
• Audubon's Aviary: The Original Watercolors for The Birds of America (Skira Rizzoli, 2012)
• Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe (with Jay Pasachoff, Reaktion Books, 2019)
• Audubon As Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Recognition

Adoration of the Magi, Giotto

Olson's book Audubon’s Aviary won the 2013 Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogs of Distinction in the Arts of the New York State Historical Association.

Minor planet 471301 Robertajmolson is named for Olson, in recognition of her identification of the star in a painting of the Adoration of the Magi by Giotto (circa 1303) as the 1301 apparition of Halley's Comet. This became the basis for naming the Giotto space mission.