Charles Gates Dempsey was an American art historian of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. A longtime professor at Johns Hopkins University, he was known for reorienting Renaissance studies toward vernacular culture—festivals, masking, and poetics—alongside style and iconography. His books include The Portrayal of Love (1992), Inventing the Renaissance Putto (2001), and The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (2012). With Elizabeth Cropper he co-authored Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (1996), which won both the Jan Mitchell Prize and the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.
- Occupation
- art historian, university teacher
- Citizenship
- United States
- Born
- March 11, 1937
