My work is focused mostly on European art of the period 1300-1700, and is mostly concerned with how art allows humans to think through time and find orientation in the world. Trained as an historian, I came to art history to understand the specific ways in which material artifacts shape meanings and structure ways of being in an environment, as well as what happens when works of visual art and models of art-making cross temporal and geographical boundaries. I have also maintained an active interest in contemporary art, mostly because I see in its expansion of global reference and in its retrospective cast a set of problems that encourage taking the long view. I am regularly asked by contemporary art journals, exhibition organizers, and lecture conveners to comment on recent artistic developments within a larger historical framework, or more often recently, on events of 500 years ago in their contemporary resonance: the violent takeover of Tenochtitlan and the destruction of the Aztec population by small pox (1520-21), the slave rebellion against the Spanish on the island of Haiti and the first circumnavigation of the globe (1522)—these events offer much to reflect on in the current moment.
Lately, my interests have turned to questions of physical orientation and configurations of place in early modern European art. More than any other artistic tradition in the history of art, European art of the period 1300-1500 was dedicated to depicting far-away people, places, and things, and to connecting those places to local realities. This pervasive orientation, and the challenges and affordances that it offered visual media, contributed to many of the distinctive features of what is called Renaissance art: naturalism, perspective, story-telling, anachronisms of various kinds, and new forms of artistic self-awareness. My ultimate goal is to understand how it was possible for a Europe-centered view of the world to emerge in the art of the sixteenth century out of this less familiar, “oriented” worldview. I have pursued research on these questions at various research centers, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence.
My recent activity offers a fair representation of my scholarly interests and my interest in engaging broader publics in global questions concerning the translations of art through space and time, its conservation and reclassifications, its reframing and modes of exhibition. I have recently been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanites for a book project entitled Amerasia, recently published by Zone books. I have written pieces on Bernini and Michelangelo for the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, co-edited a volume of wide-ranging essays for the Brooklyn Rail, and made contributions on questions of style, art forgery, and the contemporary exhibition industry for the journals Artforum, Frieze Masters, and October. Recently, I’ve co-edited a volume of essays that build bridges between art conservation, art practice, and art history, another on the afterlife of Ravenna in the Renaissance as well as one on Metapainting in the early modern period and have written the Introduction to a volume of Leo Steinberg’s essays on Michelangelo’s Painting. In recent years I have been invited to lecture on problems of orientation and on the impact of the Age of Encounters on European worldviews at London’s National Gallery, Caltech, Harvard University, U.C. Berkeley, U.C.L.A., M.I.T, University of Washington, the Bibliotheca Hertziana and University of La Sapienza in Rome.
Some of my ideas are controversial, yet I am no prideful loner. I am a great believer in dialogue and collaboration in my field and across fields, and with colleagues all over the world. I now serve as Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, which publishes articles from all the Humanities disciplines. I have been part of research groups in France, Germany, and Spain, and have published four volumes of essays commissioned from multiple authors. I work often with colleagues across disciplines as well as in the world beyond academia, particularly the spheres of art making and curating. I am a consulting editor at Cabinet Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail, and am now series editor for the Irving Sandler Essays in the Visual Arts at the Brooklyn Rail, putting me into collaborative relationship with artists and writers from many worlds.
I consider myself an ambassador of my home institution, actively connecting students and colleagues through larger networks of scholarly exchange. In 2007-8, my first year at NYU, I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Europe’s answer to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Before that, I served as Mellon Professor, a two-year research position at this country’s pre-eminent research center in art history at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and more recently I was Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, Florence. I have participated in several research groups across Europe. I have served on the boards of prominent journals and on the selection committees of major granting agencies.
The field of early modern art is neither as large nor as central as it once was. I believe this is an opportunity for the field to revise its premises and to come into a different configuration. I don’t believe that graduate students belong to one advisor or one department. “It takes a field”—this should be our motto. Accordingly, I have mentored students, officially and unofficially, from many other programs, including UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, USC, Rutgers, Princeton, Columbia, and various universities in Rome, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid.
Selected Publications
Books
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The Expanded Field of Art Conservation (edited with Caroline Fowler), Clark Art Institute, 2022. [order The Expanded Field of Art Conservation online] |
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Ravenna in the Imagination of Renaissance Art (edited with Giancarla Periti), Brepols, 2020. [order Ravenna in the Imagination of Renaissance Art online] |
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Renaissance Metapainting (edited with Péter Bokody), Brepols, 2020. [order Renaissance Metapainting online] |
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Bending Concepts: The Held Essays on Visual Art (edited with Jonathan T.D. Neil), Rail Editions, 2019. [order Bending Concepts online]
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Medieval Modern, Thames and Hudson, 2012. [order online]
Interviews with Alexander Nagel about Medieval Modern:
[www.tandhblog.co.uk] [www.popmatters.com]
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The Controversy of Renaissance Art, University Of Chicago Press, 2011.
Awarded 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association.
Interview with Alexander Nagel about The Controversy of Renaissance Art: [www.rorotoko.com]
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Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, co-edited with Lorenzo Pericolo, Ashgate Press, 2010. [order online] |
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Anachronic Renaissance (co-authored with Christopher Wood), Zone Books, 2010. [order online]
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Michelangelo and the Reform of Art Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [order online]
Awarded the Gordan prize for best book in Renaissance studies by the Renaissance Society of America.
[email ifa.web@nyu.edu for a PDF of this book] |
Selected Writings
“Raphael’s Global Philosophy,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 77/78 (2022): 267-82. [Read "Raphael’s Global Philosophy" online]
"Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Rose: The Revelation of the Earth,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 75/76 (2021): 291-303. [Read "Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Rose" online]
“The Shape of Generation in Art,” in Senzamargine: Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium, eds. Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Stefano Chiodi (Venice: Marsilio, 2021), pp. 61-71. [read "The Shape of Generation in Art" online]
“Hell Is for White People: A painting from 1515 turns a mirror on its viewers,” Cabinet Magazine, June 10, 2020. [read "Hell Is for White People" online]
“Shared Ground (Marie Denise Villers’ portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes at the Metropolitan Museum),” in 4Columns, June, 2020.
[read "Shared Ground" online]
“Amerasia: European Reflections of an Emergent World, 1492-ca. 1700,” Journal of Early Modern History 23 (2019): 257-295. (Co-author: Elizabeth Horodowich) [download PDFof Amerasia]
“Conversations on the Page” (on the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer), Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 2018. [download PDF of Conversations on a page]
“Don’t Look Away: Hubert Robert’s L’Accident,” Cabinet Magazine 54 (2014) [download PDF of "Don’t Look Away"]
“The Panic That It Induces,” Should I Go To Grad School?, eds. Bosko Blagojevic and Jessica Loudis (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) [download PDF of "The Panic That It Induces"]
“Beyond the Relic Cult of Art,” Held Essays on Visual Art, Brooklyn Rail, July 15, 2014 [download PDF]
“Objects That Are Only Boundaries,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum, 2014) [download PDF]
“Style-eating Granite,” Cabinet Magazine, 2014 [download PDF]
Some Discoveries of 1492: Eastern Antiquities and Renaissance Europe, Seventeenth Horst Gerson Lecture, held on November 14, 2013 (Groningen: University of Groningen, 2013) [download PDF]
"How Medieval Art Can Help Us Rethink the Exhibition Industry,” Frieze Masters 2 (2013): 44-51 [download PDF]
"Robert Smithson Removed from the Source," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64 (2013): 285-88 [download PDF]
"Interview with Robert Smithson, March 20, 1968 (prologue by Irving Sandler, annotated by Alexander Nagel)," Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64 (2013): 289-98 [download PDF]
Review of Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and his Rome, in London Review of Books, January 3, 2013 [download PDF]
Review of Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeeth-Century Painters, eds. Philip Sohm and Richard Spear (Yale University Press, 2010) [download PDF]
"Art out of Time: The Relic and Robert Smithson,"Artforum 51, 2 (2012): 232-39. [download PDF]
“Twenty-five notes on pseudoscript in Italian art,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59/60 (2011): 229-48 [download PDF]
Contribution to the forum “Questions of Style,” Artforum 49, 1 (2010): 258-59. [download PDF]
“Roundtable on the Global before Globalization,” with Barry Finnbar Flood, Alessandra Russo, Eugene Wang, and Christopher Wood, moderated by David Joselit, October 133 (2010): 3-19. [download PDF]
“The Afterlife of the Reliquary,” in Treasures of Heaven: Saint, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, eds. Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2010), 211-22. [download PDF]
Coauthored with Christopher Wood. "What counted as an Antiquity in
the Renaissance?" In Renaissance Medievalisms, Toronto, 53-74.
Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. [download PDF]
"Icons and Early Modern Portraits." In El
Retrato del Renacimiento, edited by Miguel
Falomir, Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2008.[download PDF]
"Authorship and Image-making in the Monument to Giotto
in Florence cathedral." Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53-54 (2008): 143-151. [download PDF]
"From the Vault: Preview of Jacopo Tintoretto at the
Prado." Artforum 45 (2007):
109-110. [download PDF]
Nagel, Alexander and Christopher Wood. "Towards a new model of
Renaissance anachronism." Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 403-32. (with responses by Michael Cole, Charles Dempsey, and Claire
Farago. [download PDF]
"Fashion and the now-time of Renaissance art," Res:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (2004):
33-52. [download PDF]
"Experiments in art and reform in early
sixteenth-century Italy." In The Pontificate of Clement VII: History,
Politics, Culture, edited by Kenneth
Gouwens and Sheryl Reiss, 385-409. London: Ashgate, 2004. [download PDF]
"Art as gift: Liberal art and the Discourse of
Religious Reform in the Renaissance." In Négocier le Don-Negotiating
the Gift, 387-413.Paris: Deutsches Historisches Institut,
2003. [download PDF]
"The Antipodes of Modernity: Distinguished Scholars’ Session in honor of Leo Steinberg," lecture at the College Art Association, 2002. [link to lecture]
“Recent literature on Lorenzo Lotto.” (Review of Lorenzo
Lotto by Jacques Bonnet; Lorenzo Lotto by Peter Humfrey;, Lorenzo Lotto: Master
Painter of the Renaissance by David Alan
Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco; Lorenzo Lotto e l'Immaginario
Alchemico by Mauro Zanchi), Art
Bulletin 80 (1998): 742-46. [download PDF]
"Altarpiece (Definition and History)." In The
Dictionary of Art.London: MacMillan, 1996, I, 707-13. [download PDF]
“Recent literature on Fra Angelico.” (Review of, Fra
Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by
Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Jane Marie Todd and, Fra Angelico at
San Marco by William Hood), Art Bulletin,
78, 1996, 559-65. [download PDF]
"Leonardo and sfumato." RES: Anthropology and
Aesthetics, 24 (1993) 7-20. [download PDF]
Harvard University, Department of Fine Arts (1987-1993): M.A. 1990, PhD
1993.
University of California, Berkeley, Department of History (1982-1987):
B.A. 1987.
Université de Montpellier, Département d'Histoire (1984-1985):
D.E.U.G. 1985.
