Lisa Pon

For over two decades, I have been probing the status of artistic authority in the Renaissance. I challenge longstanding ideas about the work of art through my study of the materiality and mediation of images, and their fixed placement or mobility. In my earlier projects, as in the one supported by the Guggenheim, I ask how we write about art and artists, what we want to know and can know historically, and what sustains our visual interest and intellectual curiosity, even after five hundred years.

I wrote Printed Icon: Forli’s Madonna of the Fire (Cambridge, 2015) and Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, 2004), and co-edited/-authored The Books of Venice/Il Libro Veneziano (with Craig Kallendorf), a special issue of Word and Image, “Printing Matters: The Materiality of Print in Early Modern Europe” (with Graham Larkin), and Changing Impressions: Marcantonio Raimondi and Sixteenth-Century Print Connoisseurship (with Clay Dean and Theresa Fairbanks). I also lead the interdisciplinary research project to virtually return the experience of Pope Julius II’s books to their intended site in the Vatican Palace, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura. Since 2019, I have been professor of art history at University of Southern California.

Photo Credit: Mike Glier