Dr Robert Brennan

I am a specialist in Italian art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. My first book, Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (2019), reconstructs a late-medieval concept of "modern art" (ars moderna) that became prominent in Italy around the year 1400, particularly in discussions of the earlier Florentine painter, Giotto (d. 1337). Currently I am working on a new book project that places Italian Renaissance theories of art in a transcultural framework, linking the increasingly global exchange of objects into broader circulations of people, words, and concepts over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. My first article related to this project, forthcoming in The Art Bulletin, investigates the early history of the term "arabesque," a word that Italians used to describe motifs deriving from Islamic art.

Alongside these projects, I have a longstanding interest in the relationship between art and language, a topic that I explored most recently in an article on Raphael and Michelangelo, forthcoming in Oxford Art Journal (Spring, 2022). Another longstanding interest is the relationship between art and capitalism, which I developed in an essay on late fourteenth-century painting for the volume Renaissance Metapainting (2020), and in an article on Albrecht Dürer and the Protestant Reformation, published in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (2016-17).

Before joining UQ, I completed a PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and went on to hold postdoctoral fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and the University of Sydney. I have also taught at the Parson's School of Design (The New School, New York), and worked in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.