Each semester the Italian Academy invites prominent Columbia University professors to open one of their regularly scheduled classes to the public, bringing students and the community together in the Academy building. This spring the Academy welcomes professors from the departments of Art History, Classics, and Italian who will lecture on topics related to Italian history.
Michael Cole writes and teaches on European art of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, with a specialization in early modern Italy. His recent books and articles have focused on sculpture and urbanism in Rome and Florence, on Renaissance magic and demonology, and on experimental printmaking. He came to Columbia after teaching for seven years at the University of Pennsylvania; in 2009-2010, he was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College. His books include Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (2011), The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World (with Rebecca Zorach, co-editor, 2009), The Early Modern Painter-Etcher (editor, 2006), Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, (with Mary Pardo, co-editor, 2004), and Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (2002). His essays have also appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, and The Oxford Art Journal, among other places. He earned his PhD in Art History from Princeton University in 1999.
