RESEARCH
My research mainly focuses on the development of art historical thinking and knowledge acquisition during the early modern period. I am not only interested in the international network of actors that shaped the writing of art history through time, but also in these scholars’ workplaces and instrumentarium as well as in the objects of their enquiries and the way these things are saturated with cultural and historical significance. As such, my research is informed by a large spectrum of theoretical traditions, including anthropology, the history of science, material and visual culture studies, and sociology.
I am currently working on a book project, provisionally entitled The Artificial Eye: Art Theory and Optical Revolution in Early Modern Europe. While it is well-known that the optical revolution completely changed our perception of the world, most notably thanks to the invention of the telescope and the microscope, its importance for the development of art history remains widely underestimated. This project interrogates the changes it produced in the reception of artworks as well as questions its repercussions on the early modern art theory. It allows me, more broadly, to think about the different perceptual regimes that determined the contact to art objects during a period extending from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
I am the PI at the University of Neuchâtel of the PRIMA SNSF research group Bibliothèques et musées en Suisse entre 18e et 19e siècles: une histoire parallèle (PR00P1_201607/1). The project investigates the historical interrelations between libraries and the emergence of museums, with particular attention to the pivotal role played by libraries—especially public institutions—in shaping the remarkably rich and diverse museum landscape that characterizes Switzerland today.
By foregrounding the multiple and generative connections that Ancien Régime libraries cultivated between books, readers, and objects, the project examines the dynamic interplay between knowledge transmitted through written texts and knowledge embedded in the materiality of objects. In so doing, it reconsiders prevailing paradigms in the history of collections and reconceptualizes libraries as both precursors and essential preconditions for the formation of a dense regional and national museum network.
Through this lens, the project contributes to a broader historiographical reappraisal of the intersections between intellectual and material cultures, thereby advancing our understanding of the cultural infrastructures that underpinned the emergence of modern knowledge institutions.
