Research

I have spent my career researching how early modern art and architecture expose relations in and between minority societies. I am fascinated by Renaissance notions of difference not simply because they inform the history of socio-religious relations but also because difference is a powerful interpretive concept as influential today as in the past. Mimicry and the Art Museum expands on the research I conducted for my previous books: The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2017 and 2019). In those monographs, I examine the relations and negotiations between Jewish cultural history and the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance. In particular, I study how early modern art and architecture became part of a policy of social distinction that deflected violence against Jewish minorities to a symbolic status.

Mimicry and the Art Museum redirects my inquiry of difference to the museum to investigate the intersection of early modern art history and contemporary issues of social justice. In this project, I examine how the popular remaking of museum images from the past can make new connections in the present through representational strategies of imitation. I argue that museum mimicry exhibits our emulative desires for ourselves, our humanity, and our environment.