Italian Renaissance art, architecture and gardens, early modern prints, issues of gender and cultural identity, uses of the past in both Renaissance and Fascist Italy

Research:
Primarily sixteenth-century Italian art, also Fascist Italy. All arts, including gardens, especially the role of visual images in the construction of social, cultural, and national identities, and issues of power, gender, and appropriation of the past.

Current research includes:
A book-length study, “Envisioning Florence: Material Culture and Collective Identity in the Sixteenth Century,” with chapters on maps and views, making visible the ancient Roman founding, collecting antiquities, personifications of Florence, especially in sculpture, and related gender issues, representations of Florentine heroes, and portraits of Florentines.

Teaching:
ARTH 2400 Introduction to Renaissance & Baroque art
ARTH 3443 Art and Society in Early Renaissance Italy
ARTH 3440 Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael
ARTH 3445 Rome, Florence, and Venice in the Sixteenth Century
ARTH 4440/6440 Constructing the Self in the Sixteenth Century
ARTH 4450/6450 Representations of Women in the Italian Renaissance
ARTH 4451/6451 Prints and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe
ARTH 540 Nature, Cultural Landscape, and Gardens in Early Modern Italy

BOOKS
The Italian Renaissance Garden, Yale University Press, 1990.
Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger Crum, Cornell University Press, 2005.

Select Articles: “Collecting Animals in Sixteenth-Century Medici Florence,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Ashgate, 2004. pp. 500-526.

"Italy is a Garden: The Idea of Italy and the Italian Garden,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, eds. Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris, Cambridge University Press, 2000. pp. 341-346.

“Gendered Nature and its Representation.” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah McHam, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 246-273.

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