Alice Ottazzi

University of Turin (Italy)

Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow in the History of Art 

In others’ hands: retouching and manipulating works on paper in Early Modern Europe 

2026–2027: Fall

Alice Ottazzi is an art historian specialized in the history of drawing and printmaking in the Early Modern period. Her scholarship explores the artistic and epistemological agency of graphic arts and connects it with art theory, material studies, and the history of ideas and knowledge. In her work, she examines the circulation of objects, people, and ideas with a particular focus on Great Britain, France, and Italy. She is interested in how the mechanisms of mobility, migration, trading, collecting, and reception shaped the visual and material entanglements of artistic production, the afterlives of works of art, and art theory.

She received her PhD in art history from the University of Turin and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, and her thesis won the Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis (2020). She was post-doctoral fellow at University Paris Nanterre (2022–2024), at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2024) and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut – Max-Planck-Institut of Florence (2025). She also taught at the universities of Aix–Marseille, Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne and Franche–Comté, and she has been collaborating with the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome).

Her book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo was published in 2024 (Polistampa) with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation.