Antonella Fenech
Centre André Chastel CNRS – Sorbonne Université (France)
Sottosopra: bodily reversals in early modern and modern images
2022-2023: Spring
Antonella Fenech is an art historian, researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Centre André Chastel / Sorbonne University (Paris, France). She has been a Fellow of the Académie de France in Rome-Villa Médicis, and received grants from the École Française in Rome and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.
Her research has been focused on the political and cultural dimension of artistic and visual productions in Early Modern Italy (Giorgio Vasari. La fabrique de l’allégorie, Olschki, 2011; Histoire de Florence par la peinture, Citadelle et Mazenod, 2012; Frises peintes. Le décor des villas et palais au Cinquecento, Somogy/Académie de France, 2017, co-ed. A. Lemoine; Les façades peintes - XVe-XVIIe siècle, co-ed. J. Koering, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor with F. Alberti of the book, Disturbing bodies. Images et imaginary in Early modern period (forthcoming).
Her current studies concern, firstly, visual representations of ludic practices in images as well as games, pastime and leisure, and the ways they shape social practices, spaces and bodies in Early modern Europe (among others papers, “Ludic Marginalities: The Other as Player in Early Modern Visual Culture“, Ludica 21-22, 2015/2016, 25-46; “Geste et désir dans les imaginaires du jeu (première modernité" ) in V. Boudier, G. Careri et E. Myara ed., L’invention du geste amoureux dans la peinture de la Renaissance (Peter Lang, 2020), 167-198). Secondly, she is working on a book project (entitled: Corps à contresens), which addresses the modalities, functions, semantics and expressions of human body depicted upside-down in Early modern and modern European visual culture.
At the Italian Academy she will be focusing on this research by investigating the visual forms of punitive bodily reversals.
Website: http://www.centrechastel.paris-sorbonne.fr/membres/antonella-fenech-kroke