Francesca Alberti

Francesca Alberti
Director of the Department of Art History (since 2019)
Fellow at the French Academy in Rome (2014 – 2015)
Contact: [email protected]
Bio

Period: 2014-2015
Profession: Art historian Francesca Alberti, born in 1982, lives and works in Paris. She received her doctorate in art history from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne with a thesis entitled Laughter, Comedy and the Ridiculous in Italian Renaissance Painting: from Correggio’s Pranks to Tintoretto’s Farcical Tales. A Renaissance expert, she has taught at the University Paris 1 and the Catholic University of West Angers. She has published several articles in professional journals (Artibus and Historiae, Studiolo, Bulletin of the Association of Italian Art Historians) and in collective works (Cuckoldry and Impotence in Early Modern Europe, Amatory Extravagances: Love beyond the Norm in the Renaissance). She is co-editor of the volumes Penser l’étrangeté (Thinking Strangeness), L’histoire de l’art de la Renaissance italienne entre bizarrerie, extravagance et singularité (The History of Italian Renaissance Art between Quirks, Extravagance and Uniqueness; Rennes, PUR, 2012) and Rire en images à la Renaissance (Laughter in Pictures à la Renaissance; to be published by Brepols in 2014). Her research has received several grants from the Centro di Storia dell’Arte Olandese (Florence), the Deutesches Form für Kunstgeschichte (Paris) and the University of Paris 1. Her research focuses on the culture of laughter and its impact on the figurative tradition; parody, folklore and popular traditions in the Renaissance. Co-editor of the journal purpose.fr since 2007, she has been director of Purpose Editions since 2013. She prompted the conception of Jean-Jaurès by photographer Gilles Raynaldy, forthcoming in October 2014.

During her stay at Villa Medici, Francesca Alberti will work on the research project À l’origine du gribouillage moderne, gribouiller et griffonner à la Renaissance (At the Origin of Modern Doodles, Doodling and Scribbling in the Renaissance), which aims to investigate the perception and practice of scribbling in Renaissance fashion from an artistic, historical and anthropological perspective. Her intent is to illustrate the significant contribution of this period to the construction of a modern conception of scribbling seen as an expressive resource for artists. Since the beginning of the modern era, the perception of scribbling has never ceased to inspire: artists have found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms and new direction for artistic language in these graphic forms which interface with popular production.