Spring 2023 Shouky Shaheen Lecture: "The Invention of the Baroque Body"

Lecturer Bio

Lorenzo Pericolo is the Vincent V. and Agatha Thursby Professor and Department Chair of Art History at Florida State University. He is an art historian with special interests in European Renaissance and baroque art and architecture. His research focus lies mostly in the artistic production of Italy, France, and Spain, although he has also published essays on Flemish and Dutch painting (Rubens, Rembrandt). An undergraduate and graduate student of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Pericolo was initially trained as an ancient Greek and Latin philologist, and this has led to his numerous philological undertakings in the history of art, such as the critical edition of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice–Lives of the Bolognese Painters (1678) in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Paired with a meticulous examination of the formal qualities of the artworks, Pericolo’s investigation of and acquaintance with art theory has enabled him to adapt different methodologies to the specificity of the topics he has studied. These include the evolution and dismantlement of the istoria (the visual narrative) in the age of the Counter-Reformation as a result of Caravaggio’s pictorial vanguard; the notion and limits of subject in early modern art; the “survival” of the Middle Ages between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries; the representation of hybrid architecture in painting; the notion of metapainting; the role of the lyrical tradition in the visual arts; and the concept of artistic perfection. Pericolo’s interest in philosophy has resulted in his forthcoming Deleuze’s Modern Baroque: The Fold, Leibniz, Informal Art, and the Objectile. In this monograph, he examines Gilles Deleuze’s definition of the modern baroque, which the French philosopher identified with the art of Jean Dubuffet, Simon Hantaï, and to a lesser extent, American Minimalism, and which inspired the “Folding in Architecture” trend as epitomized in the architectural projects of Peter Eisenman executed in the early 1990s. Pericolo is currently working on a monograph on the body in the arts of the baroque, and a research project on design as knowledge in the age of Leonardo da Vinci.

Professor Pericolo was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow at the Humboldt Universität, Berlin (2004–2005); Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington (2005–2006); Fellow in Resident of the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles (2007–2008); a recipient of a three-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant (2007–2010); and most recently, “Profesor Invitado” at the Centro de Estudios, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2022).