Art & Design Department

Frances Gage received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in the history, theory and criticism of Italian art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the intersections between art, science and medicine. Her expertise extends to the history of collecting and cross-cultural exchange between Europe and Persia in the early modern period. Among her teaching interests is the culture of the Mediterranean. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters, treating the artistic production and reception of Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio and his followers, Guercino and Guido Reni. Her studies of intellectual history and aesthetics encompass early modern theories of human diversity, geo-humoralism and race as well as animal-human relations. In 2009 she was the winner of the William Nelson award from the Renaissance Society of America for her article “Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century.” Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at the University of Toronto, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library, the Newberry Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Her book Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art was published by Penn State University Press in 2016. She is currently working on two books, one on artists and illness and a second on what early modern beholders deemed offensive in art. 

Recent Publications

Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016.

“Chasing Good Air and Viewing Beautiful Perspectives: Painting and Health Preservation in Seventeenth-Century Rome.” In Conserving health in early modern culture. Edited by Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, 237-61. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526113474/ 

“Human and Animal in the Renaissance Eye.” Renaissance Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 261-76. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rest.12295/full