Théo Luca de Luca

Théo de Luca is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at Yale University. There, he is preparing a doctoral thesis on the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin under the supervision of Professor Nicola Suthor. His first book, A New Spirit in Painting, 1981: On Being an Antimodern, was published in 2020 by Walther König in Cologne, and deals with the history of painting in the 1970s. It includes an essay and a series of interviews with key figures of the period (Georg Baselitz, Jean-Louis Froment, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Sir Nicholas Serota, among others). Alongside his research, Théo de Luca is also an art critic. He writes on contemporary American and European painting and regularly interviews artists, notably for the Michael Werner and Almine Rech galleries in Paris, London, Berlin and New York. He holds a master’s degree in art history from University College London and a licence in art history and archaeology from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, obtained after a class of lettres supérieures and première supérieure at the Lycée Montaigne in his native Bordeaux.

 

In residence at Villa Medici, Théo de Luca will continue writing and researching the first chapter of his doctoral thesis. This involves a study of the two sets of Seven Sacraments painted by Nicolas Poussin for Cassiano dal Pozzo (1636-1642) and Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1644-1648). This study focuses on the way in which the Seven Sacraments bear witness to an archaeological imagination, and form a pictorial and idiosyncratic discourse by Poussin on ancient Rome and early Christianity, i.e., a discourse on time and history. The works are thus seen as the coalition of diverse historical times in the realm of the visible. At the same time, they are seen as a position in painting vis-à-vis the debates in which seventeenth-century Roman antiquarians took part, and with which Poussin was familiar. All in all, this study highlights a painter, Nicolas Poussin, who works on a long historical scale through his works, from Antiquity to the seventeenth century. To carry out his project, Théo de Luca will take advantage of Rome’s position as a center for the renewal of studies on Roman and European antiquarians of the seventeenth century, as well as the rich collections of Roman libraries and archives.