Craig S. Harbison (April 19, 1944 – May 17, 2018)[1] was an American art historian specialising in 15th and 16th-century Flemish and Northern Renaissance painting.
He was Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
While attending Princeton University in the early 1970s, he studied iconographic analysis under Erwin Panofsky and Wolfgang Stechow.
While Panofsky was a large influence early in Harbison's career, and he described himself as once being "sort of a rebellious Panofsky-ite",[2] he moved away from pure study of iconography toward placing the paintings in the context of the social history of their time.
[3] He wrote extensively on Jan van Eyck, especially the painter's Arnolfini Portrait.