My area of research is the art and material culture of early modern Northern Europe. I have published on Renaissance aesthetics, the history of collecting, intersections of art and science, theories of ornament, aspects of the early modern domestic interior, and on the Reformation and the arts. My current research focuses on works of art and craft made for the Kunstkammer of sixteenth-century northern Europe, and in particular on the knowledge base and intellectual aspirations of the elite craftsmen who made them: urban, educated, inventive, intellectually curious, and fired by the values of humanism—whose interests intersected with those of their courtly patrons and whose creations gave material shape to the philosophical speculations and enquiries about the world that arose within the Kunstkammer’s milieu.
“The
Place of Colour in Martin Schaffner’s Universe Table.” In Early
Modern Colour Worlds, edited by Tawrin Baker, Sven Dupré, Sachiko Kusukawa, and Karin Leonhard. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
“Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early
Modern Home.” In The
Oxford Handbook to the Bible in England, c. 1520-1700, edited
by Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
“Jonas Silber’s Universe
Cup and its Sources.” In Visual Acuity and
the Arts in Early Modern Germany, edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014.
“Object, Material, Myth: Ovidian Poetics and
Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth-Century Northern European Kunstkammer.” In The
Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, edited b
G. Ulrich Grossman and Petra Krutisch, The Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of
the International Committee of the History of Art. Nuremberg: Germanischen Nationalmuseums,
2013.
“Die Rezeption Dürers und seiner Kunst im
Venedig des frühen sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.” In Albrecht
Dürer. Seine Kunst im Kontext Ihrer Zeit , ex. cat., Städel
Museum, Frankfurt-am-Main, 23 October 2013 – 2 February 2014, 2013.
Field editor and contributing author,
“Renaissance Europe, 1400-1600.” In A History of the Decorative
Arts, edited by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber. New York and New
Haven: Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press, 2013.
“Inscriptional Wisdom and the Domestic Arts in Early
Modern Northern Europe.” In Konstruktion, Manifestation und Dynamik der
Formelhaftigkeit in Text und Bild: Historische Perspektiven und moderne
Technologien, edited
by Natalia Filatkina, Birgit Ulrike Münch, and Ane Kleine. Beiträge
zu Historischen Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Trier, 2012.
541 Northern European Interiors, 1550–1680
584 Survey of European Ceramics, 1400 to 1900
621 The Renaissance Discovery of the World: Collecting and Collections in the Early Modern Era
624 Classicism in the North, 1500–1620
741 Renaissance Mythologies
846 Objects of Knowledge: Renaissance Ornament and Society in Northern Europe, 1500-1650
894 Objects of Belief: Religion and the Arts of Northern Europe 1450-1600
899 The Culture of Prints in Early Modern Europe
908 Artists, Craftsmen, and the Pursuit of Nature in Renaissance Europe
918 Material Culture and Social Life in the Early Modern Home, 1500–1700