I am Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. My research is committed to understanding early modern creative practices in all their diversity—probing forgotten interconnections between architecture, visual culture, craft, and the technical arts. Above all, I strive to recuperate the complex modes of spatial thinking, perception, and imagination that related the pictorial arts, the design of buildings and landscapes, and machine and infrastructural engineering. Although focused on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, my writing and teaching also draw links to northern Europe and the wider world.

Among my chief ambitions is to uncover and interpret the “deep” formal-structural kinships that unite artifacts apparently distinct in style and function. This project motivates my book, Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy, published by Yale University Press. The study traces the close morphological affinities between military architecture and other spheres of sixteenth-century art and design: gardens, palaces, and urban infrastructure.

I have also published on early modern architectural glass, sculptural illumination, cartography, the graphic arts, and the sonic experience of Calvinist devotion. These essays appear in journals such as Art History, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Word & Image, the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and edited volumes on fifteenth-century sculpture, natural philosophy, drawing, and Renaissance landscape.

My research has received support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Villa I Tatti, Medici Archive Project, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe at the Uffizi Gallery, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and St John’s College, University of Cambridge.

I received my PhD at Harvard University and Bachelor of Architecture at Cornell University, where I was a member of the Telluride House. I have also worked as an architectural designer in New York and Chicago.

 

Photo credit: Andrea Kane, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton