Chiara Franceschini

University College London

The flesh of images: a social history of serial expressive crucifixes in early modern Italy (1550–1650)

2015-2016: Fall and Spring

Chiara Franceschini is currently a Teaching Fellow in Renaissance Studies at UCL. She previously worked at the Warburg Institute as a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and an Academic Assistant in the Photographic Collection. She studied archaeology, Renaissance art and early modern history in Pisa, Florence and London, receiving her PhD in 2008 from the Scuola Normale Superiore. Her forthcoming book on notions of limbo (Il limbo. Storia di un’immagine) explores relations between images of the afterlife, belief and the social history of theology. Her publications in the fields of Renaissance art, visual culture and European history, 1300-1650, include “The Nudes in Limbo: Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo Reconsidered” (The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes), recipient of I Tatti Prize for Best Essay in 2011. She is currently working on the status and the normativity of Renaissance and early modern sacred images in connection with the limits of hyperrealistic art, and on art historiography and theory. She co-edited a special issue “Classifying content: Photographic collections and theories of thematic ordering” of Visual Resources (2014).

Web page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/selcs/people/italian-staff/chiara-franceschini