Over 700,000 visitors came to see Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017-18, making it one of the New York museum’s most visited exhibitions of all time. Behind this eight-years-in-the-making, breathtaking blockbuster was the Met’s Marica F. and Jan T. Vilcek Curator, Drawings and Prints, Carmen Bambach Yale College grad ’81 and Yale PhD in the History of Art ’88. The woman who took on this herculean effort had studied the Renaissance genius since she was a teen, and her first major discovery about the artist was identifying a drawing while working on her senior thesis on the Sistine Chapel. It would revolutionize how scholars understood how drawings were used in preparation for paintings.
Her Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (2019, Yale University Press), the result of twenty-four years of effort, was published, and it was the first four-volume work to win the Association of American Publishers‘ highest PROSE Awards honor, the 2020 RR Hawkins Award. Considered definitive, this comprehensive work weaves together elements of Leonardo’s work and personality. An American Academy of Arts & Sciences fellow, Carmen humanizes art masters and makes them more accessible to the general public.
Carmen won the inaugural Vilcek Prize for Excellence, a $100,000 award honoring an immigrant who has made a significant impact on “American society and world culture.” Last year she was named one of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Great Immigrants.” When she was 14, her family left her homeland Chile after Pinochet’s coup. Arriving in Greenwich, she had little skills in English but soon was studying art history and architecture as an undergraduate at Yale.