I am an Italian art historian based in Verona, working on the visual culture of Renaissance and Baroque Italy and Europe, with a particular focus on painting, sculpture, architecture, and the practice of drawing across all three.
Research Interests
My research centers on how images and objects carry meaning beyond their immediate function — how a marble figure, a painted altarpiece, or an architectural drawing can operate simultaneously as artwork, argument, and historical document. I am especially interested in the reception of classical Greco-Roman myth in Renaissance and Baroque visual culture, and in the iconography of saints and mythological figures as they intersect with the political, social, and religious contexts that shaped their commission and reception.
A second, closely related thread of my work concerns drawing, not as a preparatory or secondary practice, but as an active instrument of interpretation, transmission, and canonization. I am interested in what a drawing can and cannot tell us about the three-dimensional or built work it claims to represent, and in how draughtsmen across centuries have used graphic media to preserve, reconstruct, or reinterpret the artistic legacies that came before them. This question runs across sculpture, painting, and architecture alike, and I approach it as a single methodological problem rather than three separate ones.
Method
My approach is grounded in close visual and iconographic analysis, read alongside archival and documentary evidence. I am particularly interested in cases where an object’s identity, dating, or attribution is unsettled or contested, and in what such uncertainty can reveal about how scholarship constructs its own narratives. I take seriously the material and physical evidence of an artwork — its structure, its proportions, its condition — as a form of testimony in its own right, to be weighed alongside written sources rather than subordinated to them.
Education
I hold a Master’s degree in Art History and a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Heritage from the University of Verona. My Master’s thesis examined the architectural legacy of Michele Sanmicheli as reconstructed through the drawings of Luigi Trezza, exploring how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic documentation actively shaped the historical understanding of a Renaissance architect who left no drawings of his own.
I later completed the Diploma in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art at the University of Cambridge, earning a final mark of Distinction.
Writing
I have contributed to Daily Art Magazine, writing on Renaissance and Baroque art for a broader public audience. I am currently developing an article on Cristoforo Stati’s marble Orpheus (Metropolitan Museum of Art) for the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and preparing a paper on drawing and sculptural identification for presentation at a conference at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
Alessia Caldana 