I am broadly interested in how the arts shape culture and how culture shapes the arts. My current research explores the links between archeology, museology, and neoclassicism in eighteenth-century Italy by following the changing forms and fortunes of a group of ancient statuary from its excavation near Tivoli through installation at the new Vatican Museum, seizure under Napoleon, and return to Rome after Waterloo. By reconstructing how and by whom these artifacts were unearthed, identified, acquired, restored, displayed, contextualized, published, reproduced, confiscated, and ultimately repatriated, I hope to shed light on the multiple meanings of antiquity at the end of the ancien régime. Other projects involve the diffusion and didactic display of plaster casts, the expressive role of costume in the theatrical pictures of Dutch artist Cornelis Troost, and the significance of Ovidian themes in the paintings of Giulio Carpioni. Teaching interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, colonial Latin America, the Grand Tour, and the commemorative monument.
“Sites and Sightseers: Rome through Foreign Eyes.” In A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492-1692, ed. Simon Ditchfield, Pamela M. Jones, and Barbara Wisch, pp. 564-581. Leiden and London: Brill, 2019.
PDF available here.
“Early Modern Incense Boats: Commerce, Christianity, and Cultural Exchange” (with Meredith Martin). In The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki, pp. 513-546. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018 (Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 53).
PDF available here.
“Pleasures of the Road.” In Casanova: The Seduction of Europe, ed. Frederick Ilchman, Thomas Michie, C.D. Dickerson III, and Esther Bell, pp. 98-113; 283-285; 306. Boston: MFA Publications, 2017 (published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2017-18).
PDF available here.
“Pedagogy in Plaster:
Ercole Lelli and Benedict XIV’s Gipsoteca at
Bologna’s Instituto delle Scienze e delle Arti.” In Benedict
XIV and the Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Spirituality, edited
by Rebecca Messbarger, Christopher M. S. Johns, and Philip Gavitt, 391-418. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2016.
PDF available here.
Five chapters on Europe
from 1600 to 1830 and Spanish and Portuguese America from 1492 to independence
in History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture,
1400-2000, edited by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
“Museo Pio-Clementino,
Vatican City: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Age of the Grand Tour.” In The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in
Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Carole
Paul, 112-143. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012.
PDF available here.
“A Nation of Statues:
Museums and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rome.” In Architectural Space in the Eighteenth Century: Constructing
Identities and Interiors, edited by Denise Baxter and Meredith
Martin, 187-214. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
PDF available here.
“Know Thy Time: Batoni and
Pius VI.” In Intorno a Batoni: Atti del Convegno
Internazionale, edited by Liliana Barroero, 107-130. Lucca:
Fondazione Ragghianti, 2010.
PDF available here.
“A través de la ventana:
Pedro Friedeberg y la arquitectura sublime / Through the Window: Pedro Friedeberg’s
Sublime Architecture.” In Pedro Friedeberg. Mexico
City: Trilce Ediciones, 2009.
501 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II
502 Approaches to the Object (with Aaron Glass [2015], Abigail Balbale [2017])
522 Arts of the Baroque
590 Bard Term Abroad/Bard Travel Program
608 Western Europe in the 18th Century
674 Society and the Arts in 18th-Century France
675 Art and Court Culture at Versailles
679 Neoclassicism and the Arts in Europe and America, 1740–1840
686 Furniture and Furnishings in Early Modern France
763 The Monument: Designs and Meanings
777 Readings in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture
782 Latin America and the Hispanic World
793 The Grand Tour
888 Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800
891 The England of William Kent
911 From Ditch to Nitch: Making the Vatican Museum
936 Viceregal America: Visual and Material Culture
975 Learning to Look: Principles of Connoisseurship (with Charlotte Vignon)
