Notes on the Contributors
George Brocklehurst
is a Ph.D. student at the Warburg Institute, University of London. His thesis examines the reception of the classical art of the symposium in Italian humanism, with a focus on the academy of Giovanni Pontano at Naples. His work has received the 2021 Society for Neo-Latin Studies Early Career Prize and the 2022 Gaetano Cozzi Prize for studies in the history of play. He holds degrees in classics from the University of Saint Andrews and the University of London.
Tiziana Checchi
holds a degree in Humanities, History of Art, from the University of Rome La Sapienza, where she also received a Postgraduate Diploma in History of Medieval and Modern Art and a Ph.D. in History of Art (2011). Since 2012 she has been the director of the Ecclesiastical Cultural Heritage Office at the Territorial Abbey of Subiaco and a member of the Lazio Regional Council for Ecclesiastical Cultural Heritage. She has participated in numerous national and international conferences and research projects, collaborating, among others, with the University of Rome La Sapienza, the Vatican Museums, the University of Southampton, the Academy of Architecture University of Italian Switzerland (USI), the University of Salerno and the Galleria Colonna in Rome.
Alessia Dessì
holds a Ph.D. in Early Modern Art History and is a graduate archivist of the Vatican School of Palaeography, Diplomatics and Archivistics and the State Archives in Rome. She is the author of several publications on the relationship between art, literature and antiquarian culture in the second half of the fifteenth century and has presented in and organised numerous international conferences. She is currently a lecturer in Museology and Criticism of Art and Restoration at the Sapienza University of Rome and works as an archivist at the Historical Archives of Fondazione Camillo Caetani in Rome.
Katrina Grant
is a Research Fellow at the Power Institute for Arts and Visual Culture, The University of Sydney. She is an art historian and digital humanities expert with a focus on early modern Italy. Her research focuses on the history of early modern Italian gardens and landscapes, the visual culture of performance in the same period and the application of digital technologies to art history and art collections (digital mapping in particular). Her publications include articles and book chapters on the garden history of Italy, history of emotions and set design, digitisation in the gallery and museum sector, gaming and European history, the Arcadian Academy and culture in early eighteenth-century Rome and artistic relationships between Britain and Italy in the eighteenth century. She is the author of Landscape in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Garden and Visual Culture (2022), which explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in Italian courts around the turn of the seventeenth century.
Christiane Lauterbach
is a researcher and deputy head librarian at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. She studied art history, German philology and history at the University of Cologne and has published on German and Dutch garden history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Maria Cristina Loi
is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Civil Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. She graduated in Architecture from the Sapienza University in Rome in 1986. In 1989 she obtained a Master of Arts at the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia University, New York, and in 1995 a Ph.D. at Sapienza University. Her main areas of research are American architecture (focusing on the process of defining American architecture after the Revolution, with particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Jefferson and the phenomenon of Palladianism), modern and contemporary Italian architecture (especially Milanese) and architectural drawing. She has published widely on these subjects and has organised several conferences and exhibitions with the Politecnico di Milano and other institutions such as the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and the Archivio del Moderno in Mendrisio.
Lauro Magnani
was Professor of the History of Modern Art at the University of Genoa. His research has focused on pictorial and sculptural production between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the relationship between artists, patrons and the public, religious iconography, and the interpretation of aristocratic interiors. He has published over two hundred books and articles and curated numerous exhibitions. Magnani has published widely on historic gardens and his monograph The Temple of Venus is now in its third edition. A summer fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. (1997), he returned in 2001, where he initiated various collaborations. Most recently, he curated the exhibition Grottoes and Gardens in the Time of Rubens. Delight and Wonder in Genoa at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century and produced the accompanying catalogue (Genoa 2022).
Giorgio Mangani
teaches intercultural heritage geography at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage, Ravenna Campus. He is a historian of geographical thought and cartography. He has published books and essays on Abraham Ortelius, Gerard Mercator, Cyriac of Ancona, the painter and botanist Gherardo Cibo, humanist views of cities, the persuasive power of maps, the representation of landscape, and sixteenth-century Dutch and Italian maps and atlases. His work is available at www.giorgiomangani.it
Sergio Monferrini
is an archivist at Dal Pozzo d’Annone Archive and F. Crespi Archive and an independent scholar. His main interests are the history of Milan, Lombardy and the Province of Novara in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular attention paid to noble families, especially the Borromeo and Arese. He has published widely on these subjects as well as on baroque art, music and theatre in Northern Italy.
Laurent Paya
holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the Agrocampus Ouest (Angers, France) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR, Tours). As Chief Engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture, he teaches landscape architecture and garden design. He is an associate researcher in art history at the CESR and the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Sciences humaines et sociales (Université Montpellier III). His research focuses on the aesthetics of the garden, ornament, decoration, and the city in the early modern period.
Alessandro Spila
is Research Fellow and Professor of the History of Early Modern Architecture at the Politecnico di Torino, Faculty of Architecture. Previously, he was Adjunct Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome (2018–2019) and Research Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance (2015–2017). His research interests include the history of architecture in Rome between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the history of gardens, the history of festivals and ephemeral representations, and the reception of antiquity. He is the author Palazzo Colonna nel Settecento. Architettura e potere nella Roma del secolo dei Lumi (2020).