Biography

Lia Markey specializes in artistic and cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas, Medici patronage, prints and drawings, and the history of collecting. Her book manuscript Imagining the New World in Medici Florence examines the Medici engagement with the Americas and its effects on collecting and art production in sixteenth-century Florence. She has published articles in the Journal of the History of Collections, Renaissance Quarterly and various edited volumes. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, and contributed to several museum exhibition catalogues, including, most recently, Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum.

Project Summary

This project examines Giovanni Stradano’s Nova Reperta series of engravings (c. 1588). Through analysis of the prints’ iconography, captions, preparatory drawings, sources, as well as the interests of the patron, she hopes to reveal how the series depicts invention as both global and yet specifically Florentine. Most broadly, the study investigates the relationship between innovation and cross-cultural exchange in the late sixteenth century.