Richard E. Spear (born 1940 in Michigan City, Indiana) is an American art historian and professor who specializes in Italian Baroque painting.
His research and publications have focused on seventeenth-century European art, ranging from a two-volume catalogue raisonné on Domenichino (1581–1641) to studies based on iconographic, psychoanalytic, feminist, and economic methodologies.
[10] In addition to nearly 100 articles on Baroque art (see From Caravaggio to Artemisia: Essays on Painting in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France, pp.
601–06, for a complete bibliography through 2002), he has published studies on the European painting collection in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, India, and written for the Times Literary Supplement, The Artnewspaper, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune.
In 1972 he was awarded the Daria Borghese Gold Medal for the best book of the year dealing with a Roman subject.