Julia Siemon

Julia Siemon is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Columbia University, where she is a C.V. Starr Fellow. She graduated from Washington University in 2006 with a B.A. in the fields of Art History and Spanish. She earned her M.A. (2007) and M.Phil (2009) from Columbia, supervised by Profs. David Rosand and David Freedberg.Julia has presented papers and chaired panels at the College Art Association (2010), the Sixteenth Century Scholars Conference (2010) and Renaissance Society of America (2013 and 2014). She is a co-student coordinator of the New York Renaissance Consortium and research assistant for Professor Freedberg. Julia holds a predoctoral fellowship from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, under the direction of Prof. Dr. Alessandro Nova. Julia’s dissertation is entitled Courtiers Seeming Soldiers: Bronzino and the Politics of Portraiture in 1530s Florence, and examines issues of ideology, identity, and representation during a period of social unrest. The project addresses the political resonance of portraits by Bronzino and Pontormo, specifically those created between the establishment of the Last Florentine Republic in 1527, and the formation of the Accademia Fiorentina in 1541. The paintings are placed within a framework of contemporary Florentine political and intellectual culture, with the goal of highlighting potential instances of artistic dissimulation and dissent.