Expertise: Italian Renaissance Art

My research and teaching interests range widely in Italian art and culture from c. 1300-c.1600. My current research focuses on the complex culture of the “late Renaissance” (c. 1530-1600), a period characterized by religious crisis, intense artistic and cultural experimentation, and the rapid development of early modern art theory and criticism. I have become particularly interested in archaism and retrospection as responses to concerns about religious and social identity in this period of rapid artistic and cultural change, and more generally in the ability of artistic styles to carry or make meaning. In a forthcoming book, Federico Barocci. Allure and Devotion in late Renaissance Painting, I investigate the negotiations between retrospection and innovative pictorial practice that characterize much of the best art of the second half of the sixteenth century. In so doing, I explore the formation of early modern pictorial strategies; the prehistory of the medieval revival; and unexpected ways in which period art criticism and theory can enable new readings of the cultural significance of stylistic choices in sixteenth-century painting. In my current project, tentatively entitled Bronzino’s bodies and Titian’s brush, I consider the transformations of the sixteenth century from a different perspective – a study of the period attempt to place the ideal human body at the center of representation. The investment in the body as the defining core of a modern representational project constituted a remarkably radical cultural endeavor that was riven from its inception with deep tensions. My study focuses upon the critical years after the middle of the sixteenth century, when these tensions became particularly acute.

Other research and teaching interests include: the religious image, and particularly the altarpiece; the rise of mythological painting; period conceptions of the power of images; the culture of the “desiring beholder;” and the developing relationship between painting and music. Beginning in academic year 2006-7, I will offer courses in Italian art of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and will teach regularly in UW’s Rome program.

Selected Publications:

Federico Barocci. Allure and Devotion in late Renaissance painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press (forthcoming 2007).

“Retrospection and the genesis of Federico Barocci’s Immaculate Conception,” in Only Connect. Studies in Honor of John Shearman, ed. Lars Jones and Louisa Matthew. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Art Museums, 2002, pp. 215-222.

“Francesco Maria II della Rovere and Federico Barocci: some notes on distinctive strategies in patronage and the position of the artist at court,” in The Della Rovere: The Creation and Maintenance of a Noble Identity, ed. Ian Verstegen.  Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, forthcoming 2007.