Contexts, Communities, Connections.
New Narratives in History of Art

The department focuses on global culture through the study of the history of art and architecture between the late medieval and modern periods. It places Italy in dialogue with Europe, the Mediterranean, the Iberian Americas, and the rest of the world, through a transdisciplinary approach.

Over the coming years, the department will deal with two fundamental challenges: reconciling the advancement of art-historical research with broader themes connected to urgent contemporary problems; continuing and reviving the established tradition of early modern and modern studies, bringing to the fore the complexity of the Renaissance and its polycentric and global nature, as well as its appeal and ability to speak to younger generations.

The title of the department encapsulates the key concepts with which projects, labs and actions will face these challenges. New narratives in the history of art will be reconstructing the socio-historical and physical contexts around works of art, architecture, artifacts. They will shift the attention – too often directed to authorship and to single individuals – towards a plural and choral sense of art and to the agency of communities, both past and present, understanding their local challenges as well as their global ones. Furthermore, new narratives will work to re-establish connecting threads by combining a deep on-site and philological knowledge of specific territories, with insights from global and universal approaches, considering local and global as mutually and simultaneously intersecting dimensions.

The department's research projects, digital labs and on-site actions focus on the early modern and modern period, but with a strong contemporary perspective. They adopt a multi-scale and horizontal approach, between micro and global history, open to contemporary themes, scalable into the medium- and long-term. They are carried out by interdisciplinary research groups, bringing art history into dialogue with other disciplines (history, philology, neuroscience, biology), while contemporary art is regarded as essential to reading history in unforeseen ways and in making art history part of a growing awareness of present urgencies.