PEOPLE

Elisa is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with the project ANIMATE (2022-2024). After her PhD in History of the Arts from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari in 2018, Elisa was Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Center for 17th– and 18th– Century Studies (2018-19) and Berenson Fellow at Harvard – Villa I Tatti (2021). Elisa publications focus on the representation of paradise and holiness in 15th-century Italian and Flemish Art and on the anthropomorphic representations of the ecumene in Early Modern frescoes and prints. Elisa's first essay on the Savoy ballets, entitled “Drawing Worlds. Bodies and Smoke in the Courtly Ballet Il Tabacco”, has just been published in Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period (eds. B. Wilson and A. Vanhaelen, University of Toronto Press 2022).

Bronwen Wilson is the Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art and the Director of the Center for 17th– and 18th-Century Studies and W. A. Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Her teaching and publications explore the artistic and urban cultures of early modern Europe (1300-1700), with a focus on space, print, portraiture, landscape, mobility, and transcultural, material and environmental interactions. Wilson’s new book project, “Otherworldly Natures: the subterranean imminence of stone,” probes the artistic turn to quarries, riverbeds, and lithic formations in early modern painting. The study contributes to a new five-year research project, "Making Green Worlds: Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization", with Angela Vanhaelen. Together, they have recently co-edited "Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period" (University of Toronto Press, 2022). With Paul Yachnin, Wilson is series editors for the research project Early Modern Conversions, in which their own volume, "Conversion Machines: apparatus, artifice, body", has just been published.

Sonia Cavicchioli is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, where she teaches Iconography and Iconology, Comparative Art History in Europe, and Early Modern Art History, both in the Italian (Visual Arts) and English curriculum (AMAC - Art, Museology, and Curatorship / Arts, Muséologie et Curatelle). In July 2017 she has been licensed “full tenured professor” by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca. She has been Visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Beijing (2018 and 2019). She is the author of “The Tale of Cupid and Psyche: An Illustrated History”, “L’Aquila e il Pardo” on the Estensi 17th-century patronage, from frescoes to ephemeral apparati, and "Dipingere pensieri. Francesco IV d’Austria-Este e la decorazione del Palazzo Ducale di Modena (1814-1846)". Cavicchioli has published extensively on Baroque festivals and patronage, female regency in the 17th century, iconography and propaganda, collection and interior decoration from the 16th to 18th century, and the reception of classical and biblical themes in medieval and early modern art and literature.