I am Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor and Director of The Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe at Johns Hopkins University. Much of my work over the past three decades has been concerned with a revision of the geography of Renaissance art, challenging not only notions of the “Italianness” of Italian art, but also the neo-Vasarian reduction of its history to a concentration on Florence, Venice, and Rome, dominant in the field from the mid-20th century. This work involves a critique of leading paradigms in the geography of art such as center-periphery, network theory, and place studies.  Such interests are engaged in my first (1997) book on painting in 15th century Ferrara, in subsequent studies on art in Mantua, Brescia and the Adriatic basin, and they also inform the survey text I co-authored with Michael Cole (published in 2012, re-issued in an expanded edition in 2017, and subsequently translated into Italian, Japanese and Chinese). The goal has been the development of a historically-informed critical analysis adequate to the ambitious art of the past, as well as resistance to paradigms of the Renaissance that mainly originate in the Modernist investments of 20th century scholarship, with their faith in scientific, naturalistic, and antiquarian models of style and representation. Another point of continuity has been the resistance between prescriptive humanist art theory and the insubordinations of artistic practice in competitive and sometimes politically repressive environments.   Thus, my book The Cabinet of Eros (2006) was conceived as an experiment in the investigation of pictorial meaning in Renaissance mythological images considered to be “literary” in character, arguing for the primacy of visual poetics in poetry and in painting as opposed to a Panofskyan iconology that prioritizes texts and philosophical ideas.  Such concerns also inform my recent books - Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (2025, Princeton University Press); Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Painting (Brepols-Harvey Miller, 2020) and the volume I co-edited with Stephanie Porras, The Routledge companion to Global Renaissance Art (2024, Routledge) – as well as my curatorial work: Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2002); Artifice and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (also at The Gardner, 2015), and The Renaissance Nude 1400-1530  (The Getty Museum and Royal Academy, London, 2018-19). As board member and now director of The Johns Hopkins Singleton Center for Premodern Studies I have pursued international collaborations with graduate programs in Italy and the UK, including two graduate summer schools in Material and Environmental Humanities at the Istituto Veneto, co-organized with the University of Warwick in 2024 and 2025.

Selected Journal Articles

"Eros in the Flesh: Petrarchism, the Embodied Eros and Male Beauty in Italian Art, 1500-1540." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005).

“Bronzino’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence. Counter Reformation Polemic and Mannerist Counter Aesthetics.” RES 46: Polemical Objects (2004), 99-121.

“Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003), 299-332 (co-winner of the RSA Nelson Prize, 2004).

“Fare una cosa morta parer viva: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un) Divinity of Art.” Art Bulletin LXXXIV (2002.), 596-620.

"The Carracci, Visual Narrative, and Heroic Poetry after Ariosto. The Story of Jason in Palazzo Fava." Word and Image 18 no. 3 (2002), 210-230.

“Sic in amore furens. Painting as Poetic Theory in the Early Renaissance.” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance VI, 1995, 145-69.

“Pictura and Scriptura. Cosmè Tura and Style as Courtly Performance,” Art History 19, June 1996, 267-95.