David Chambers was a loyal member of the Society for Renaissance Studies, contributed to its journal and served as its chairman.
He matriculated at Wadham College Oxford in 1953 and achieved his doctorate in 1961. Encouraged by study and travel grants, he developed an interest in Italian Renaissance history and a knowledge of Italian sources. These contributed to doctoral research under the supervision of J.R.Hale; his thesis title was English Representation at the Court of Rome in the early Tudor Period; this led to his first major publication, Cardinal Bainbridge at the Court of Rome 1509-1514 (Oxford, 1965).
After graduation, David Chambers received a Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh working with Denys Hay (1962-3). He then received a lectureship in what was then the Department of Mediaeval and Modern History at St Andrews where he worked closely with Professor Lionel Butler and a team of closely knit colleagues to create a Department of Mediaeval History with its own single honours degree.
Again in close collaboration with Lionel Butler he introduced Honours courses on the Mediterranean in the later medieval period and on the Italian Renaissance. Related to the first, David Chambers developed an interest in the history of Venice which led to the publication of a carefully illustrated and influential study, The Imperial Age of Venice. Coming out of the Italian Renaissance course came a collection of documents in translation, some of which had been identified by his pupils, Artists and Patrons in the Italian Renaissance. Both were published in 1970 and remain seminal studies in their fields.
In 1969, David Chambers moved to the Warburg Institute where he immediately felt at home and where he was active in teaching and research, continuing interests developed at St Andrews on the history of Venice and its mainland territories, the Renaissance papacy and on artistic patronage. The last two coalesced into studies on the Gonzaga court and the Mantuan archives. An extended Mantuan research period led to a collaboration with Jane Martineau to organise a magnificent exhibition at the V&A in 1981, Splendours of the Gonzaga. His subsequent publications included Clean Hands and Rough Justice with Trevor Dean (1997), A Renaissance Cardinal and his Worldly Goods (1992) and Popes, Cardinals at War (2006).
As a colleague, writer and editor, David Chambers was a good collaborator. This can be seen in his long involvement with The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,in his contribution to essay collections for two former ‘mentors’ – with John E. Law. ‘A Tribute to Denys Hay’ Renaissance Studies, 2/ii (1988), and with Cecil H. Clough and Michael E. Mallett, War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice, essays in Honour of J.R. Hale (1993). He also collaborated with Brian Pullan to produce Venice a Documentary History (2001), which led to the establishment of the Venetian seminar in the U.K. and the newsletter, News on the Rialto now in the U.S.A. David Chambers served on the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters, and then on the Publications Advisory Board of the British School at Rome in the 1970s and early 1980s. His close friendship with Nicolai Rubinstein led to his ‘inheritance’ of the Italian Renaissance seminar at the I.H.R., despite its hitherto Florentine bias.
But if David Chambers was extremely liked, respected and effective as a teacher and colleague, when it came to research his motivation was more personal, hence Rome, Venice and Mantua – relatively unstudied in the anglophone world at the time – rather than Florence. This can be seen in the collection in his honour by Philippa Jackson and Guido Rebecchini Mantova e il Rinascimento italiano (2011), and in the collection of his own essays, Individuals and Institutions in Renaissance Italy (1988).