I am interested in the networks formed by communities of readers (including artists, printers and patrons) that go beyond the usual social markers, demonstrating areas where boundaries of class, education or religious identity are penetrated by interaction with printed books and images.  To this end I am interested in investigating Roman printing and knowledge networks in the early modern period through the creation and use of a digital platform for the identification of contributors and the responsibilites of those involved in Roman printing at that time.

I am also writing about the Parasole family workshop; and color in Renaissance art and theories of vision.

My interest in the history of printmaking and book illustration has led me into the larger visual, literary and scientific cultures of early modern Italy, and the roles and creation of imagery in other media. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (Yale UP, 2000) discusses the history of the technology and uses of printing in the formation of artist's careers in late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy, seeking to identify the roots of a common literacy in disegno, which was judged to be the basis of all artistic practice. By investigating the value of disegno in fields other than the fine arts, this book points out how modes of drawing that were developed in other trades and under different circumstances were brought to bear on the mythological, technical and religious imagery of Italian Renaissance prints in the first hundred years of printing.

Subsequent research has focused on the roles of book illustration and literacy in vernacular scientific and religious treatises printed in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, particularly in Rome. In a series of articles and a book, "Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome" (Yale UP, 2014), I explore the role of illustrations in creating authorial credit and claims for particular knowledge among a newly created community of authors, publishers, printers and their patrons. New notions of intellectual property and self-consciousness about the status of authorship, the development of printing, image-making and publishing conventions for the attribution of authorship in the face of Church censorship, the stated and covert relationships between objectivity and observation, the representation of truth claims in pictures and text, the creation of an authorial voice and the rise of professionalism in the arts in the early modern period (1400-1800) are all part of my more recent work. 

Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2025-26)                                                                                                                                                     Brown University Humanities Research Funds (for publication, 2004-2012)                                                                                                                                                                                         Clark Art Institute Fellow, Williamstown, MA, Fall, 2004                                                                                                                                                                                                                 American Council of Learned Societies, Fellowship, 1997-98                                                                                                                                                                                                           Bunting Institute Fellowship, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, 1997-98                                                                                                                                                         National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Stipend, 1997
Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, 1993-94
Fulbright Grant (Rome), 1992-93
Mellon Foundation Summer Research Grant, 1991
Graphic Arts Council Fellow, Graphic Arts Council, San Francisco, 1987-88 

See: Publications tab

Books:

Brilliant Discourse: Pictures and Readers in Early Modern Rome, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014 

The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000

Digital Humanities Website:

The Theater That Was Rome: https://library.brown.edu/projects/rome/

Exhibitions:

•The Festive City, with Emily J., Peters, RISD Museum, December 21, 2012 – July 14, 2013: https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/festive-city; and https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_journals/12/       Associated Publication at: https://archive.org/details/ExhibitionNotes432012

•“The Theater that was Rome,” exhibition of illustrated books and prints from the collection of Vincent J. Buonanno,” the RISD Museum and The John Hay Library, April 9-July 11, 2004.  Exhibition and symposium in conjunction with the Graduate Student Practicum, 2004.   Associated Publication:  Lincoln, Evelyn, et al. The Theater That Was Rome: 16th-18th Century Views and Maps, Exhibition Notes 22 (Spring 2004), The RISD Museum.

•“Objects of Ornament:  European Design, 1400-1800”, RISD Museum, April-June, 2002.  Exhibition in conjunction and in collaboration with Jan Howard, Madelyn Shaw, Jayne Stokes and Thomas Michie for the Mellon funded class HA 155, “Prints and Everyday Life”, with curators from RISD’s departments of Textiles, Decorative Arts, and Prints, Drawings and Photographs.   Exhibition Notes 20 (Spring 2002), The RISD Museum: https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/object-ornament.  Associated Publication: https://archive.org/details/ExhibitionNotes18Spring20021

Renaissance Society of America
Print Council of America
College Art Association

I teach lecture courses on the history of Italian Renaissance art, as well as a team-taught introduction to Italian Renaissance art, literature and history in the Departments of the History or Art & Architecture, Italian Studies, History, and Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. I am also a member of the Committee on Science and Technology Studies. My thematic graduate and undergraduate seminars take up topics in the history of the book and print culture in the early modern period, often taught in the special collections libraries at Brown. I also teach graduate and undergraduate seminars in Italian art and visual culture in the Departments of the History of Art & Architecture and Italian Studies, as well as the graduate Methods seminar, and Graduate Practicum in the History of Art.

I have directed Honors Theses on diverse subjects: the history of an atlas at the John Carter Brown Library, women in Renaissance art, patron saints, Flemish portraiture, Mannerism, Piranesi, and garden automata, among others. Graduate dissertations I have directed tend to be interdisciplinary in the fields of the history of collecting, history of science, anthropology and ritual, gender studies, and print culture, primarily centered in early modern Italy, but also in France and Portugal.