2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

in my hiring for a tenure-track professorial position.
A significant part of my time in New York was thus spent preparing
for these two most crucial events in the trajectory of a young
scholar: I was occupied for several weeks with the painstaking revision
of the book’s proofs, based on my doctoral dissertation; and
many days were dedicated to the oral presentations that were part
of the job application procedures.
I did not, however, neglect the post-doctoral research project for
which I applied to the Italian Academy in the first place, and I managed
to collect a fair amount of sources and information that should serve as
an infrastructure for the epistemological study of the paintings of the
Hispano-Neapolitan painter Jusepe/José de Ribera.
My overarching research program discusses seventeenth-century
Central Italian painting as the site of epistemological subversion.
For the Italian Academy project, I started analyzing the contribution
of Ribera to the treatment of these issues. Early in his career, in his
Roman years, he was one of the most direct followers of Caravaggio,
a protagonist of my dissertation; but later on Ribera evolved into a
fully individual artistic personality, and further developed some of
Caravaggio’s innovations.
Most current research on Ribera concentrates on filling in the lacunae
in the artist’s biography; on describing the change of style that
arguably occurred around 1635, from darker, “naturalist” paintings to
a more idealistic, classical style; and on discussing Ribera’s confused
“national” character as a Spanish-born artist working in Spanish-ruled
Naples for patrons both Spanish and Italian.
My project attempts to interpret Ribera’s art in terms of its epistemological
stance on questions of sensorial perception, information
transmission and opaque mimesis. Iconographical depictions of the
senses are a convenient starting point, but my aim is to show how Ribera’s
pictorial interest in these issues can be detected even in works
whose subject matter is more diverse. Columbia’s rich and varied
collections were ideal for an overview of this multidisciplinary topic
involving not only art history, but also philosophy, history of science,
cultural studies and theory of religion.
During my stay in New York, I was in close contact with art
historians at Columbia, as well as other institutions in the city (NYU’s
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