Research Focus
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Italian Renaissance art
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The role of visual images in the construction of social, cultural, and national identities
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Issues of power, gender, and appropriation of the past.
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Sixteenth-century Florence, Michelangelo, and ancient Roman founding
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Italian Renaissance gardens
Publications
Books:
Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger Crum, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
A collection of fourteen essays, including by Claudia Lazzaro: “Forging a Visible Fascist Nation: Strategies for Fusing Past and Present,” 13-31,“Politicizing a National Garden Tradition: The Italianness of the Italian Garden in Fascist Italy,” 157-69, and co-authored Introduction and Epilogue.
The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
Selected Recent Articles:
“The Third Nature over Time,” in Constructing a “Third Nature”: Gardens and Landscapes of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Anatole Tchikine, University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture), 2020 - in publication.
“Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel and its Aftermath: Scattered Bodies and Florentine Identities under the Duchy,” California Italian Studies, 6 (2015), 1-35. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gv6c9b5
“Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and their Antique Models,” in Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600, eds. Alison Poe and Marice Rose, Leiden: Brill Press, 2015, 350-392.
“River Gods: Personifying Nature in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies, special issue: ‘Locus amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance,’ ed. Alexander Samson, 25.1 (February 2011), 70-94.
“The Italian Garden: Two Different Concepts”/ “Il giardino italiano: due differenti punti di vista,” in Ville e giardini italiani: I disegni di architetti e paesaggisti dell’ American Academy in Rome, ed. Vincenzo Cazzato, Rome: Istituto Poligrafo dello Stato, 2004, 17-30.
"Collecting Animals in Sixteenth-Century Medici Florence,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Ashgate, 2004. 500-526.
“Representing the Social and Cultural Experience of Italian Gardens in Prints,” in The Changing Garden: European and American Gardens, 1550-2000, ed. Betsy Fryberger, exhibition catalogue, Berkeley: University of California Press and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Arts, Stanford University, 2003, 29-39.
“Italy is a Garden: The Idea of Italy and the Italian Garden,” in Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France, ed. Mirka Beneš and Dianne Harris, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 29-60, 341-346.
Books in preparation:
“Audacious Portraits: Bodies, Armor, and Power in the World of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici”
“Florence, a New Rome: Merging Ancient Past, Michelangelo, and Present in Sixteenth-Century Visual Imagery”
