Fine Arts Department

Stephanie Leone

boston college fine arts department

617-552-6459
leonest@bc.edu

M.A. Syracuse University, Graduate Program in Renaissance Art, Florence
Ph.D. Rutgers University

Fields of interest:
Renaissance and Baroque Italian Art with concentrations in: architecture and urban planning, patronage, domestic art, Renaissance Florence, the papal court in Rome, and women as patrons and artists.

Academic profile:
My primary field of research concerns domestic art and architecture in seventeenth-century Rome. My current research project on the collecting habits of Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj, who amassed an impressive collection of contemporary still-life, landscape, and genre paintings in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, seeks to understand the relationship between cultural and economic value in art collecting. My recent book on the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona considers the intersection between palaces and the social rituals enacted in them and the roles of artists, patrons, and advisors in building. I have also worked on the development of the Renaissance villa in fifteenth-century Italy.

Teaching:
I teach courses on Italian art of the Early and High Renaissance and the Baroque. In undergraduate seminars, I have explored topics related to my research interests: the architecture, decoration, and material culture of Italian palaces from 1450-1650; domestic architecture around the world, co-taught with Prof. Jonathan Bloom; and the history of collecting and museums, co-taught with Prof. Nancy Netzer, Director of the McMullen Museum of Art. I also teach an interdisciplinary course on the history, art, and literature of early modern Rome with professors from History and Romance Languages. I am planning a study-abroad summer course on Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture in Rome, for 2009.

Representative publications:

  • The Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona: Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (NY and Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2008)
  • "La storia dell'architettura di Palazzo Pamphilj." In Il Palazzo Pamphilj nella piazza Navona, Roma: gli affreschi, ed. Francesca Cappelletti (Rome: Poligrafico dello Stato, forthcoming)
  • "In vogue in fifteenth-century Florence: the material culture of marriage." In Where the Secular Meets the Sacred in Medieval and Renaissance Art, exhibition catalogue (McMullen Museum of Art, 2006)
  • Walls and Memory: the Abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri (Lazio), from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond, ed. by Lisa Fentress, Caroline Goodson, Margaret Laird, and Stephanie Leone (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005)
  • “From Medieval Monastery to Early Renaissance Villa: the patronage of Giovanni Tortelli,” and “The fattoria of the Doria Pamphilj.” In Walls and Memory: the Abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri (Lazio), from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond (Brussels, Brepols Publishers, 2005)
  • “Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilj Builds a Palace: Self-Representation and Familial Ambition in Early Modern Rome.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63 (2004)
  • “Il colore della facciata del palazzo Pamphilj in piazza Navona: i documenti del archivio.” I Beni culturali 4-5/03 (2003)