Hello.  My name is Marjorie Och and I am Professor of Art History at Mary Washington College, the College of Arts and Sciences at the UMW in Fredericksburg, VA.  My research focuses on the patronage of art in early modern Italy, particularly patronage by women and how patrons communicated ideas about themselves in works they commissioned.  I am also engaged in a long-term project examining the role of cities in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568).