2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

ing, such as Giuseppe Gerbino in the Department of Music, Pamela
Smith in History, and David Freedberg and Michael Cole in the
Department of Art History and Archaeology. I also valued being
able to discuss my work with Andrew W. Mellon research fellows in
New York museums, such as Davide Gasparotto and Valeria Cafà at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Nathaniel Silver at the Frick
Collection, and with New York-based colleagues in the field, such
as Andrew Morrall, Peter Miller and Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate
Center), Patricia Rubin (IFA, NYU), Gerry Milligan (CUNY) and Jacqueline
Musacchio (Wellesley College). During the semester, I was
invited by Suzanne Cusick to deliver a paper on my research at the
Music Department Colloquium, NYU, and contributed a paper to
the conference “The Impact of Art,” organized by David Freedberg
and Wim Blockmans at the Italian Academy. I am deeply grateful
to the staff and Fellows of the Italian Academy for making my time
there not only tremendously productive, but also highly enjoyable.
Flora Dennis returns to her position as Lecturer in Art History at the
University of Sussex.
Leon Jacobowitz Efron
During my semester as an Associate Research Fellow at the Italian
Academy I worked on my book on Dante’s popular religious reception
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My study explores the
various ways in which Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was described as
a religious figure possessing spiritual authority, taking into account
a variety of sources (sermonaries, legends, chronicles, poetry and
other sources). It further traces some of the genealogies of these
descriptions and suggests how interaction between different cultural,
religious, political, and intellectual factors, such as humanism,
Florentine politics, and the Western Schism, may have contributed
to the emergence of Dante’s religious image, and, indeed, how an
analysis of these factors may be used to explain the very existence
of the so-called Dante theologus topos for the very first time.
Past research on Dante theologus was usually literary, dealing
with the question of whether or not Dante was writing in the
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