Davide Ferri, M.A.

Davide Ferri is an art historian interested in the entanglements between images, environments and political discourses, mainly between 1600 and 1850, bridging art history with visual and cultural studies. As Scientific Coordinator of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, he heads the Research Coordination & Public Relations unit and collaborates in various research projects of the institute.

Davide holds a B.A. in Art History and Archaeology and an M.A. in Art and Visual History from Humboldt-University, Berlin. He is completing a PhD in Art History at the University of Bern, under the supervision of Professor Urte Krass and within the framework of the doctoral program in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg. His dissertation, provisionally titled «The Queen of Genoa and Baroque Territorial Aesthetics», investigates the political, devotional and ecological agency of «landscape» in the Republic of Genoa (Liguria, Corsica, North-Tunisia) in the 17th century.

From 2019 to 2023, Davide was Academic Assistant to the Director in the Department of Professor Gerhard Wolf. Before coming to the KHI, Davide worked at, among others, the Humboldt Forum Foundation, the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, the Cluster of Excellence «Image, Knowledge, Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory», and as a researcher for Berlin-based galleries with a focus on East Asian art. He held fellowships of the DAAD and the Swiss-European Mobility Programme.

Davide co-authored the German commentary of J. J. Winckelmann’s Roman Writings (2020). His further publications—on topics spanning from seventeenth-century visual culture to contemporary art—have appeared as catalogue essays as well as articles and reviews in leading journals. Since 2020, he is member in the editorial board of ArtHist.net, the worldwide largest information network for art historians. In 2021, he co-organized the international conference Against Identity? Discourses of Art History and Visual Culture in Italy.