Faculty biography - Janet Goodhue Smith
Janet Goodhue Smith earned her BA degree in English Literature from Harvard University in 1964. After finishing her MA in art history at Yale University she first came to Italy in 1967 to do research on a Ph.D. dissertation on fifteenth-century military architecture. That was just after the terrible flood in 1966 and Florence was still trying to dry out and pull itself together. The next year, 1968, was one of student rebellion all over the world and Italy was a big protagonist - an exciting time to be in Europe. After spending another year in New Haven she returned to Italy and received a fellowship from CRIA, the committee to Rescue Italian Art, to work in the drawing cabinet at the Uffizi Galleries for almost two years, making corrections on the catalogue of architectural drawings. She did research for another year and a half as a fellow of the Roberto Longhi Foundation. Her first teaching position was with the Lake Forest College program in Florence, before they joined ACM. She has also taught for Dickinson College in Bologna, for William and Mary in Florence and for Georgetown University in Fiesole. In the mid 1970s she began teaching for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest program, which was fairly new then. Gradually she took on the responsibility for the organization and has been handling all the administration for about 25 years. However, her first love is teaching and she conducts two upper level courses in the fall and a course for each of the sessions of the London/Florence program in the winter and spring.
Her major interest is Italian architecture and over the years she has taught courses on Florentine architecture from the ancient world to the present as well as seminars on Brunelleschi, on medieval towers and palaces. The period that she likes to focus on is the late 15th to early 16th centuries and she has also done courses on Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, mannerism and the art at the time of the fire and brimstone reformist, preacher Savonarola. Other favourite courses are: Medici patronage, Images of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, Florentine palaces and funerary chapels.
In 1979 she married Giovanni Tonarelli in the Palazzo Vecchio, thereby becoming a dual USA/Italian citizen. Giovanni ran restaurants for many years and then a small business which made hand colored reproductions of antique prints. In recent years they have spent many weekends and part of the summer in a small flat they bought in an old Tuscan farm house in the hills above the sea.