Among the most beautiful and compelling works of Renaissance art, painted maps adorned the halls and galleries of princely palaces. This book is the first to discuss in detail the three-dimensional display of these painted map cycles and their full meaning in Renaissance culture.
Art historian Francesca Fiorani focuses on two of the most significant and marvelous surviving Italian map murals–the Guardaroba Nuova of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII. Both cycles were not only pioneering cartographic enterprises but also powerful political and religious images. Presenting an original interpretation of the interaction between art, science, politics, and religion in Renaissance culture, the book also offers fresh insights into the Medici and papal courts.
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Francesca Fiorani received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Renaissance art history from the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” She is a Professor of art history at the University of Virginia where she teaches a great variety of courses, from large lecture classes on Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance to advanced seminars on art and science, cartography, gender and much more. She served as the Chair of the Art Department in 2013-14 and as Interim Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities, a position to which she has been appointed for a full three-year term in 2015-26. As the Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities she is in charge of all arts and humanities programs at U.Va –a total of 14 departments, three centers and institutes, 13 Ph.D. programs, 2 MFA degrees, and over 250 faculty.
She is known for her knowledge of the science behind Renaissance art and for her ability to treat as works of art things that are not usually regarded as such – maps, diagrams, scientific images, instruments. She is a keen explorer of new ways to do scholarship and has become an expert in digital art history and modern technology in the humanities. With the collaboration of an international team of scholars in literature, computer science and art, she is the editor of a major digital project to make available worldwide Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting and the many hand-written copies that circulated for over a century before the book was available in print. Here is the web address: http://www.treatiseonpainting.org.
She is also part of a small circle of Leonardo scholars, whom she has convened in numerous conferences, including two at UVA (October 2005 and April 2012), one in Florence in collaboration with Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut (May 2011), and another at Tel Aviv University sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Israel (May 2008). She also designed a special post-doctoral program to introduce Leonardo da Vinci to an educated public of non-specialists. The program was so successful that the National Endowment for the Humanities funded it in full while the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz hosted it in Florence. A digital publication came out of this program (http://faculty.virginia.edu/Fiorani/NEH-Institute/essays/).
Her first book, The Marvel of Maps. Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 2005), was a finalist for the 2006 Premio Salimbeni per la Storia e la Critica d’Arte, a prestigious book award given by the President of Italy (the book was translated into Italian in 2010 as Carte dipinte. Arte, cartografia e politica nel Rinascimento). Among her scholarly books are also Leonardo da Vinci and Optics: Theory and Pictorial Practice (2013), a collection of essays, co-edited with Alessandro Nova, from the most prominent Leonardo scholars, and Bartolo di Fredi’s Adoration of the Magi: a Masterpiece Reconstructed (2012), co-edited with Bruce Boucher, about a large panel painting of the Adoration of the Magi painted by a Siennese artist of the early Renaissance. The painting had never left its Sienna gallery before.
From 2015 she is the principal investigator of the research project The Indigenous Arts of Australia and the Americas which is housed at the University of Virginia and funded by the Andrew H. Mellon Foundation.
Her research has gained recognition from numerous institutions, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, the American Council for the Learned Societies, the Getty Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Institute, the John Carter Brown Library, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Germany, and the Warburg Institute, University of London.
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