Essays and Reviews
This website has been created to honor and preserve the writings by Gail Leggio published in American Arts Quarterly. Virtually all of her essays and reviews from her more than two decades as a contributing editor are included, on subjects ranging from the classical heritage to American art, from the old masters to contemporary realists, with substantial attention to 19th-century European art. Also here are her signature articles on the city of Rome and related topics.
Gail Culver Leggio (1947–2016) was raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, and received her graduate education in English literature at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. After completing her Ph.D. there, she studied in Brussels, Belgium, on a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship in art history. Upon returning to the U.S., Gail settled in Manhattan and later Brooklyn. Across her career, many of her finest essays take a resourcefully interdisciplinary approach. Her critical intelligence is matched by a prose style remarkable for its lucidity and grace.