Joris van Gastel

Joris van Gastel is an art historian based in Switzerland, where he teaches at the University of Zurich. He studied psychology and art history in Amsterdam and Venice, and obtained his PhD from Leiden University. In addition to short-term fellowships in Florence, Rome, Ferrara, and Berlin, he held postdoctoral positions at Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Warwick, and the University of Hamburg. Before taking up his position in Zurich, he was a research assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. As part of his habilitation, he worked on issues of materiality and identity in Baroque Naples.

Focusing on the etchings of Roman ruins by the 17th-century Dutch painter and printmaker Bartholomeus Breenbergh, his project seeks to link the irregular and contingent nature of the etching medium to what will be characterized as the ecology of ruin landscapes. The main hypothesis is that the medium and the subject share something in common, something that can be related to the interconnected themes of chance and memory in early modern thought, both in relation to Dutch and Italian art theory.