Welcome:
Bianca de Divitiis
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz is pleased to welcome from January 1, 2026 Professor Bianca de Divitiis of the University of Naples Federico II as new Director at the KHI and as Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. She is starting the new Department Contexts, Communities, Connections. New Narratives in History of Art.
Bianca de Divitiis (b. 1974) is an art and architectural historian, expert in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods across Europe and with an interest in connections to wider geographies. Since 2011 she teaches History of Art at the University of Naples Federico II. From 2020 she has served both as Deputy Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies, as Dean Delegate for Humanistic Research and also as member of several University boards.
Her graduation thesis led to the ground-breaking article in The Burlington Magazine (2003) on her discovery of an album of drawings from the office of Sir John Soane, also acknowledged in The Times. In the last twenty years she has been working on art, architecture and antiquarianism between the late medieval and modern periods, overturning deeply rooted prejudices and filling in gaps in the knowledge of Renaissance culture.
Her thesis for the PhD of Excellence of the joint Universities of Venice (IAUV, VIU, Ca’ Foscari) was published as a book on architecture and patronage in fifteenth-century Naples (Marsilio 2007).
From 2011 to 2016 she was the PI for the interdisciplinary ERC Project HistAntArtSI (www.histantartsi.eu). Together with the research group she coordinated, she was able to open up a new field of research on the Renaissance in southern Italy which is still expanding and producing results, including A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy (Brill, 2023; https://brill.com/edcollbook-oa/title/39291).
She has also directed the large-scale national project on trans-Mediterranean connections The Renaissance in Southern Italy and in the Islands: Cultural Heritage and Technology (PRIN 2017-2024), and was a member of two international research groups on the European and global Renaissance: The Quest for an Appropriate Past in European Architecture (Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences, 2014-2018) and Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas (Columbia University – Getty Foundation, 2017-2022).
Throughout her career she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the IUAV University in Venice, the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, The Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, The Paul Mellon Centre – Yale University. At present she is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, the Palazzo Reale in Naples, the Center for the Art History of Port Cities – La Capraia (Naples-Houston), and the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples; until 2024 she was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She is a founding member of the Centro Europeo di Studi su Umanesimo e Rinascimento Aragonese, member of the Academia Europaea (from 2022), and of the Accademia di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Napoli (since 2024).
Her publications include articles in international peer-reviewed journals (19) and volumes (40). She is editor or co-editor of four volumes, of the HistAntArtSI online database and of the webapp ANTONELLO, which was awarded with two prizes.
Find more detailed information here: CV, publications.