Biography

Holly Flora is Associate Professor of Art History at Tulane University. Her research explores the intersections of narrative, imagination, and gender in the devotional art of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. She is the author of The Devout Belief of the Imagination: the Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Brepols, 2009), as well as a number of articles and museum publications. She has held fellowships from the Scuola Normale di Pisa, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Association of University Women, the Kress Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome.

Project Description

Building on research conducted while I was an Andrew Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Frick Collection, my book project considers the artist Cimabue (ca. 1260-1302) in terms of his Franciscan patrons, arguing for a new interpretation of the way the mendicant orders shaped artistic change in the early Renaissance.