Gian Girolamo Savoldo:
Artistic Invention and Censure in Pre-Modern Italy

My dissertation research examines Gian Girolamo Savoldo (ca. 1480 – after 1548), a Brescian painter whose itinerant career brought him to Florence, Parma, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, Milan, and more. This mobility encouraged his inventive artistic practice, evident in his Christian works and his half-length portraits, which display his experimentation with captivating visual effects and blending of pictorial genre. Savoldo’s pupil, Paolo Pino, described his master’s painting practice as “shackled between the hope of praise and the fear of censure.” My Ph.D. dissertation investigates this tension in Savoldo’s works, arguing that his image making practice illuminates the mechanisms that stimulated the diverse expressions of pre-modern Northern Italian art and the trajectory of the critical and religious discourses that censured them.

Engaging with recent scholarship on the environmental humanities, networks, mobility, and craft knowledge, my dissertation offers a historicized and nuanced account of Savoldo’s output. My research is particularly concerned with illuminating his workshop environment and understanding how his vision of modern art was linked to ecocritical perspectives and developments in the study of nature.