Fourth-year Ph.D student
My primary interest lies in the intersection of the history of ideas and visual aesthetics.
My project concerns the intellectual constituency of the stylistics of painting in 15th-century Italy, especially with regard to Piero della Francesca. I am examining the non-narrative, formalistic character of the artworks in light of two major approaches to knowledge and reality in pre-modern thought: the demonstrative, syllogistic, and monological on the one hand, and the Socratic and dialogical on the other. Drawing on the methodology of the phenomenological school, I am investigating how Quattrocento art took influence from both the rigidly intellectualizing inclination of the former and the nuanced and self-corrective outlook of the latter.
I am engaging with trajectories found in different intellectual movements, including scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, the Oxford Calculators, and Islamic natural philosophy. I am interested in the place and function differing conceptions of nature, mathematics, as well as the theology and metaphysics of form in these contexts. The influence of poetic subjectivism in Petrarch and other Italian poets also plays an important role in my research.
Another objective of my project is to provide evidence for concrete interactions between artists and intellectual figures, whether in the form of personal encounters or through textual channels. Towards this end, I am examining courtly life and patronage in the Early Renaissance, and I also intend to systematically examine libraries and collections that Quattrocento painters would have accessed.
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