Area of Research:
Early Modern European Art (Late Medieval to Baroque)

Specializations:
Art and Art Theory in the Spanish Netherlands; Netherlandish Artists in Italy; images of devotion; the History of Collections (Antwerp); cosmological themes in northern European art.

To date, much of my work has focused on the intersection between the artistic and scientific spheres in the early modern period. I am particularly interested in the ways in which notions of artistic invention, authenticity and value were redefined in the course of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries. In my forthcoming book Last Things: Art and Religious Practice in the Age of Reform, I discuss a broad variety of pictorial media and artistic genres (indulgenced prints, architectural designs for a Sacro Monte, wax busts in reflecting cases, and ‘poetic hells’ painted on copper) and address aspects of artworks and artifacts that have received little attention in scholarly literature: the materiality of media, the status of copies and reproductions, images of terror and fright.

In addition the work of Peter Paul Rubens remains of great interest to me. I am currently working on a group of paintings created in the 1610s (mythological, allegorical and religious) and centered around his Italian experience. A larger book project, tentatively titled Antwerp, Antiquity, and the New World: Art after the Golden Age, c. 1566–1618, explores the historical affinities between the areas of art, archeology and commerce as well as the cosmological, geographical, and natural philosophical discoveries of the time.

Before I moved to the United States, I studied and/or taught in Zürich, Berlin, Rome and London; I return to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany often for research. My studies have been supported by the J. Paul Getty Program, the German Research Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the British Academy, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Huntington Library among others.

Courses Taught (selection):
Northern Renaissance Art; Art and Visual Culture in Early Modern Antwerp; Peter Paul Rubens; Hieronymus Bosch; Art, Science and Religion, c. 1600; Iconoclasm; Images of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Art and the Senses; Art History Seminar in Rome.

Books:
Last Things: Art and Religious Practice in the Age of Reform (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).

Die Kunst des Fegefeuers nach der Reformation. Kirchliche Schenkungen, Ablass und Almosen in Antwerpen und Bologna um 1600, Berliner Schriften zur Kunst, vol. 7 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996): discusses the invention of a central image of salvation as well as changing attitudes toward gifts to the church and thus of the very means by which most religious art was created.

Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber, Intersections, vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Articles (selection):
“Fire, Smoke and Vapour. Jan Brueghel’s ‘Poetic Hells’: ‘Ghespoock’ in Early Modern European Art,” in Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber, Intersections, vol. 9 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

“Rubens’s ‘Ecce Homo’ and his ‘Derision of Silenus’: Classical Antiquity, Images of Devotion and the Ostentation of Art,” in Image & Imagination of the Religious Self in Medieval and Early Modern Europe , ed. W. Melion (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).

“Impressed on Paper and on Hearts: David Teniers’ Portrait of Bishop Triest (1652) and the Virtue of the Image of Christ's Wounds,” Emblemata sacra. The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Illustrated Sacred Discourse, ed. Ralph Dekoninck and Agnès Guiderdoni-Bruslé (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 569-592.

“Affectionate Gifts: Rubens’s Small Curiosities on Metallic Supports,” in Munuscula Amicorum. Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. Katlijne van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 47–62.

“„Figura passionis“: Abraham und Isaak im Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund,” in Isaaks Opferung in den Konfessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ulrich Heinen and Johann Anselm Steiger; Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 101 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter), pp. 153–84.

Essays on self-portraits by Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Lutma the Younger, and Palma il Giovane in Der Künstler als Kunstwerk. Selbstportäts vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer and Valeska von Rosen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005).

“Der Sacro Monte von Varallo als Laboratorium der Emotionen: Das irdische Paradies, Adams Sünde und der Beginn der Passion” [The Sacro Monte of Varallo as Laboratorium of Emotions: The Earthly Paradise, Adam’s Sin and the Passion of Christ], in Unmitte(i)lbar – Über das Lesen von Emotionen, ed. Paul Michel. Schriften zur Symbolforschung, vol. XV (Zürich: PANO-Verlag).

“Saintly Patronage: Peter Paul Rubens and Bishop Maximilian Villain de Gand in the Cathedral of Tournai”, in Flemish Art in Command, c. 1550–1700, ed. Katlijne Van der Stighelen, and Hans Vlieghe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 135–157.

“Wachs und Interdisziplinarität: Giovanni Bernardino Azzolinos ‘vier Letzte Dinge’”, Zwischen den Disziplinen? Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Helmut Puff und Christopher Wild (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 103–148.

“Is Seeing Believing? The Use of Evidence in Representations of the Miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory,” The German Studies Review, 76 (2001), special issue: Evidence and the Insistence of the Visual, ed. Eric Downing and Christopher Wild, 120–42.

“Securing Space in a Foreign Place: Peter Paul Rubens’s Saint Teresa for the Portuguese Merchant Bankers in Antwerp,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 57 (1999), 133–151.

“Actio in Peter Paul Rubens’ Hochaltarbildern für die Jesuitenkirche in Antwerpen,” [Actio in Peter Paul Rubens’s Miracles of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier] in Barocke Inszenierung. Der Moment in dauerhafter Erscheinung, ed. Josef Imorde and Klaus Krüger (Emsdetten / Zurich: Edition Joseph Imorde, 1999), 24–45.

“Marie Luise Gothein (1863–1931). Weibliche Provinzen der Kultur,” [Marie Luise Gothein (1863–1931): “Female Provinces” in German culture around 1900] in Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt, ed. Barbara Hahn (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994), 44–62, 294–300.

“Die Disziplinierung des Heiligenbildes durch altgläubige Theologen nach der Reformation. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Sakralbildes im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit,” [The “Taming” of Holy Images by Catholic Theologians: Theory of the Religious Image at the Threshold of the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe] in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Robert W. Scribner and Martin Warnke, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, vol. 46 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), 263–298.