Alessio Assonitis

Alessio Assonitis (Rome, 1970) received his doctoral degree in Renaissance art history from Columbia University in 2003. He has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Herron School of Art, and the Christian Theological Seminary. In 2003-4, he served as Allen Whitehill Clowes Curatorial Fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  He arrived at the Medici Archive Project in the fall 2004, with a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He became MAP Research Director in 2009 and Director in 2011. His position is endowed by the Florence J. Gould Foundation. His research interests include Quattrocento and Cinquecento painting in Rome and Tuscany, antiquarian studies, history of Mendicant pauperism, and early modern travel history. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the historical journal Memorie Domenicane. His monograph on the painter Fra Bartolomeo della Porta and his workshop at the convent of San Marco is due out in 2012. Along with Brian Sandberg, he is editing a collection of essays on the Medici Granducal Archive (The Medici and their Archive: Power and Representation in Early Modern Tuscany, Rome: Viella Editore, 2012).

Selected Publications:

“Savonarola and the Aesthetics of Roman Pollution,” in Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease, and Hygiene in Rome from Antiquity to Modernity, eds. Mark Bradley and Kenneth Stow, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Bastiano Mainardi: Painter of Altarpieces in Renaissance Tuscany, Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2011
 
“Consecrated Spaces, Sacred Journeys,” In Extremis: Landscape into Architecture, ed. Erieta Attali, New York: Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University Press, 2011: 46-48

“The Birth of Maria de' Medici (26 April 1575): Hearsay, Correspondence, and Historiographical Errors,” in Time and Space on the Way to Modernity: The Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley, London: Ashgate, 2010: 104-119

“Fra Zanobi Acciaiuoli’s Oratio in laudem urbis Romae (1518): Antiquarianism and Savonarolism at the Time of Raphael,” in Watching Art: Writings in Honor of James Beck / Studi in onore di James H. Beck, Lynn Catterson and Mark Zucker, eds., Rome: Ediart Editrice, 2006: 55-63

“Art and Savonarolan Reform at San Silvestro a Monte Cavallo in Rome: 1507-1540”, Archivum fratrum praedicatorum, LXXIII (2003): 205-288
 

Selected Conferences & Lectures

“L’eredità cateriniana nel movimento savonaroliano. Il caso di San Silvestro al Quirinale”, Caterina e la sua eredità, Convento di Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, 27-29 October 2011

“Anti-Renaissance and Material Culture at the Time of the Medici Grand Dukes”, Renaissance Now!, University College Cork, Cork, 10 December 2010

“Bronzino at the Court of Cosimo I de’ Medici: The Painter, the Secretary, the Duke and his Archive”,Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 April 2010.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Vmz_8P1kE)

“At the Time of Galileo: Art, Music, and Science in Early Modern Florence: circa 1600”, The Legacy of Galileo, The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, 18–20 June 2009

“The Miasma of Rome: Fra Girolamo Savonarola on the City of Popes and the Urbs Antiqua”, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease, And Hygiene in Rome From Antiquity To Modernity, British School at Rome, Rome, 21-22 June 2007

“Ciphered and Coded Letters to Cosimo I de' Medici (1537-1574)”, Salander O’Reilly Galleries, New York, 18 May 2006