Interview: The Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow—Stefano de Bosio

The Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in autumn 2025 at Columbia University's Italian Academy was Stefano de Bosio. We asked him a series of questions about his work, and he answered in writing. 

Italian Academy: What are your main areas of research and what have you been working on in recent years?

Dr. de Bosio: A central thread in my research concerns the mobility of artists, artworks and ideas in early modern Europe. In 2021 I published Frontiere: Arte, luogo e identità ad Aosta e nelle Alpi occidentali, 1490–1540, a book for which an English edition is currently in preparation. The book examines specific aspects of art produced in the Duchy of Savoy around 1500, and the ways in which these artworks have been interpreted within different historiographical traditions, especially Italian, French, and Swiss. It tries to unpack the implications of the center–periphery dyad, one of the most influential frameworks in the formation of art history as a discipline, and shows how border regions can actively reorient our understanding of artistic exchange and canon formation.

In recent years, my research has increasingly turned toward another dimension of orientation: the image-theoretical operations through which image orientation is constructed and perceived, particularly those involving lateral (i.e., left–right) reversal. Reversal is embedded in many early modern media, most notably printmaking, where the passage from matrix to impression systematically transforms orientation. It also intersects with practices of viewing, such as Leonardo’s recommendation to observe a painting in a mirror to detect its “mistakes.” At the heart of the book I am currently writing thus lies a simple question: what does reversal do to an image? And what can it reveal about past notions of form and composition, as well as about the changing relations between artists, artworks, and viewers?

Italian Academy: Please tell us about your work at the Italian Academy.

Dr. de Bosio: The Italian Academy has provided an ideal framework for advancing the manuscript of my book on lateral reversal. I devoted particular attention to the section on early modern practices of image doubling—through mirroring, replication, and counterproofing—in the display practices of artworks in early modern Europe. In New York, I was able to study rare French and English print albums from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These volumes make visible the historical complexity of specular (i.e., mirror-like) page layouts; for instance, when an engraving is mounted alongside a counterproof or a left–right reversed copy. Such pairings invite questions about collecting and visual intelligence: what were collectors looking for when they assembled these constellations of images? Pursuing that question also forces a reconsideration of symmetry as a theoretical and historical and cultural notion. Far from being a stable, self-evident concept, symmetry has a long and contested history, marked by significant shifts in meaning between classical and modern usage. What these albums make visible is that symmetry was not merely a formal ideal, but a cognitive and collecting practice: an instrument for testing equivalence, variation, and visual intelligence across images.

Italian Academy: Your work moves between different academic cultures and languages. How does this international trajectory shape your research questions?

Dr. de Bosio: I received my training in Italy (Turin and Bologna), and in France (Paris), and I currently work in Berlin. This trajectory has been formative in the most concrete sense, because it has exposed me to distinct methodological traditions and ways of doing art history.

In each of these countries, one can still discern distinct intellectual tendencies. In Italy, for instance, connoisseurship continues to exert a strong influence. In its most refined forms, following Roberto Longhi, it is inseparable from broader historical and cultural interpretation. Two of my teachers, Giovanni Romano and Enrico Castelnuovo, were both shaped by the Longhian model, yet each profoundly reinvented it through sustained dialogue with other approaches ranging from literary history to cultural anthropology and sociology. In Germany, theoretical reflection plays an especially prominent role in art history, not least through Bildtheorie (image theory), which asks in radical terms what an image is and how it operates. That theoretical tradition, and its conversation with Medienwissenschaft (which only imperfectly can be translated with Media Studies) has been crucial for my work on lateral image reversal. 

Italian Academy: How do you see the situation of your field in Germany, where you are based, and in general? What challenges are there? What developments are particularly important for the future?

Dr. de Bosio: Art history, like all humanities disciplines, interacts with—and is shaped by—the aspirations, tensions, and transformations of contemporary societies. Its current debates are therefore manifold, ranging from questions of restitution and the critical reassessment of museum collections to the challenge of articulating genuinely transcultural perspectives on image-making and reception. 

If I were to stress one point here, it would be that art history today must engage in sustained dialogue with the many other disciplines that study images from historical, theoretical, and empirical perspectives—ranging from visual culture and media studies to cognitive science and vision research. In Germany, this challenge has been addressed through the wide-ranging debates pf the last three decades around Bildwissenschaft, or image science, which has sought to expand the conceptual scope of the discipline. 

The task, however, is not simply to add new terminologies or import external methods. What matters, in my view, is identifying meaningful areas of convergence while also acknowledging productive epistemic frictions between different approaches. Interdisciplinarity becomes fruitful only when it sharpens our questions rather than dissolving them. Personally, I find especially promising those trajectories that allow us to test the interaction between image-making, reception, historically situated worldviews, and the history of perception. In my recent work, I often return to questions that might be described—somewhat paradoxically—as a form of historical phenomenology: how were images experienced, spatially and materially, under past perceptual regimes?

Italian Academy: Could you illustrate this approach with a specific example from your recent work?

Dr. de Bosio: One example comes from the international research network I have led in recent years on imprinting and the “logic of the negative.” In an essay for the forthcoming Brepols volume Contact: Techniques and Metaphors of Imprinting, which brings together the proceedings of the Berlin conference I co-organized, I examine how printmaking and imprinting practices shaped the European study of ancient glyptics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What proves particularly revealing is the centrality of depth and relief perception in the transmedial renderings of intaglios—that is, engraved gemstones belonging to the tradition of ancient glyptic art, in which images are carved in recessed form into hard stone. In this sense, early modern visual practices intersect in strikingly precise ways with questions that continue to animate contemporary research on perception, especially concerning depth cues, figure-ground relations, and haptic vision. For art history, this creates an opportunity not only to engage critically with perception studies, but also to contribute historically grounded material capable of expanding and complicating present-day theoretical models.

Italian Academy: What research directions will you pursue in the coming years?

Dr. de Bosio: Back in Berlin, I will begin a new research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) devoted to the role of orientation in early modern ekphrasis, that is, in verbal descriptions of artworks. The project investigates how references to spatial coordinates structured the way artworks were imagined, narrated, and cognitively framed in texts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. If images possess a lateral configuration that can be transformed through medial operations, texts, too, organize spatial relations and guide embodied imagination. 

Studying how early modern writers on art oriented their readers within imagined pictorial spaces offers a further way to connect art-historical approaches with questions of perception and cognition. Ultimately, the project proposes that orientation constitutes a fundamental condition under which artworks are not only produced, but also become thinkable, narratable, and historically intelligible across media.