The Institute of Art History welcomes Ross Debernardi as a new Humboldt Fellow. As part of an international network of scholars, he will contribute to our ongoing research and academic activities.
Ross Debernardi holds a joint PhD in Art History and Medieval Studies from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). His current research focuses on sacred images apparently produced by nature in Western science and devotion.
15.10.2024
SHORT BIO
Ross Debernardi holds a joint PhD in Art History and Medieval Studies from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, France). He has worked on the visual and written culture of Franco-Italian aristocracy between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century, and on the development and circulation of Christian allegories in late medieval and early modern art. His current project explores the place occupied by sacred images apparently produced by nature in Western science and devotion.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Designed by Nature? Sacred Images Produced by Minerals, Plants and Animals in Western Science and Devotion (14th-17th Century)
Project founded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. Duration: 01.10.2024 – 31.08.2025
My project spotlights a category of religious objects that has hitherto escaped scholarly investigation: sacred images that appeared to be a product of nature. Objects of this kind—such as marble slabs whose veining suggested a silhouette of the Virgin, or plants whose shape recalled that of a crucifix—garnered considerable attention in late medieval and early modern Christian culture. Regarded both as divine prodigies to be revered and as natural wonders to be investigated, they were described and reproduced in travel accounts, religious writings and natural history treatises. Combining sources and methods from art history and the history of science and knowledge, my research will chart the world-wide geography of these objects, investigate their materiality, and explore their embedding in late medieval and early modern Christian culture. In particular, it will show how their study can deepen our understanding of the perception of natural environments and materials in Western culture, of the emergence of empiricism, and of the evolution of historical ideas concerning the agencies of nature, God and man in the shaping of the physical world.