Expertise: Early Modern European Art

My research interests to date cohere around a determination to read visual forms closely and to allow these readings to transform prevailing views generated by other disciplines of historical inquiry. I have just completed a book on the seventeenth-century Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy and his pursuit in Rome of a modern artistic practice in “the Greek manner.” In the study I reconstruct the understanding of Greek art from 1550 to 1650 and the contributions of Duquesnoy’s circle to the coalescence of the Greek ideal within European culture. This seventeenth-century vision of Greek art is shown to have formed the basis of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s early understanding of the formal perfections of Greek sculpture, overturning the longstanding assumption that no meaningful distinction between ancient Greek and Roman art was made prior to Winckelmann’s work. A second book, Sculptural Form and Reform: Francesco Mochi and the Edge of Tradition, is currently underway, and research for this project was supported by a Villa I Tatti Fellowship during academic year 2006-07. This study will interpret Mochi’s strange and compelling sculptures in relation to issues of religious and artistic reform in sculpture and Tuscan cultural self-understanding at a moment held to mark the effective end of this tradition. Though my recent work has focused upon the understudied field of early modern sculpture, I am interested in all media and particularly fond of ephemera. Other current research interests include Gian Paolo Panini’s Gallery Views and the Italian perspective on the Grand Tour.

I offer courses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern European art, and will teach regularly in UW’s Rome Program.

Selected Publications
 
François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
 
“Contending with Hercules: François Duquesnoy’s Cupid Carving his Bow and Sculptural Theory and Practice in Rome in the 1620s.” In The Muse in the Marble: Plastic Arts and Aesthetic Theories in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Anthony Colantuono and Elisa Di Stefano, University of Delaware Press, forthcoming.

“The Greek Manner and a Christian Canon: François Duquesnoy’s Saint Susanna,” Art Bulletin 84 (March 2002): 65-93.

“The Evolution of Michelangelo’s Magnifici Tomb: Program versus Process in the Iconography of the Medici Chapel.” Artibus et Historiae 35 (1997): 91-100.