Prof. Mauro Mussolin

Mauro Mussolin is an architectural and art historian with a Ph.D. from the Università IUAV di Venezia (2001). His scholarly work is devoted to the Early Modern period, and it explores how art and architecture transform and reconfigure the experience of space, helps generate founding myths, reinforces metaphors and symbols, forges collective memory and civic identities, incubates political and religious meanings, as well as showcase productive settings that define new standards of living. He has worked extensively on urbanism during the medieval and modern periods in various Italian cities, and on the history of Religious Orders, the sacralization of space, the origin of civic cults, and the production of sacred, political, and civic images. He is also deeply interested in material culture from the Late Medieval to Modern period, such as drawings and draftsmanship, paper and paper-making, and the practice of architectural models as instruments of the design process.

In addition to his extensive research on Michelangelo, he is writing a book titled Michelangelo and Paper as Palimpsest which focuses on the artist's idiosyncratic use of paper in drawing and writing.

Over the years, he has been a Research Associate at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2009–2015), and he has taught architectural and art history at New York University Florence at Villa La Pietra (2004–2014). As a fellow, he was at Villa I Tatti Florence – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2003–2004), CASVA The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (2015–2016), the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University in New York (2016–2017), The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2016, and 2018). As visiting professor, he has been invited to the Kusthistorisches Institut in Florenz (2012), the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (2015), The Getty Research Institute (2018), the ENAC-EPFL – Faculté de l'environnement naturel, architectural et construit de l'École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (2019).