Biography

Dr. Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, where she studies French art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. She has published two monographs: Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain (University of Delaware Press, 2020) and Pierrot and his world: art, theatricality, and the marketplace in France, 1697-1945 (Manchester University Press, 2024). Pierrot and his world will be published in a French translation by Les Presses du Réel in 2025. Her current research on the seventeenth-century etcher Jacques Callot has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship (2026-2028) from the Leverhulme Trust. Having previously been a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2015-2018), Dr. Knowles is delighted to be joining I Tatti.

Project Summary

Between 1614 and 1621 the young etcher Jacques Callot (1592-1635) worked in Florence in the Grand Ducal workshops. As Filippo Baldinucci vehemently argued in his account of the lives of Renaissance printmakers (1686), Florence played a key role in the artistic formation of Callot, who was one of the most prolific and influential etchers of early modern Europe. Combining compositional ingenuity with a distinctive linear style, Callot’s unprecedented visual form constitutes his greatest contribution to the history of art. This research assesses the Florentine sources of Callot’s innovative visuality. A full understanding of what Callot owed to Florence will go beyond a passing reference to the “mannerist” characteristics of Callot’s linear style, delving instead into the exchange between print, drawing, and three-dimensional artistic productions from the Grand Ducal workshops, including scenography, sculpture, and pietre dure. Considering period-specific conceptions of disegno as the art of drawing as well as the use of drawing to design and project three-dimensional form and space, this research studies drawings and prints by Callot in Florentine collections as well as drawings and prints that have a relationship to a range of three-dimensional mediums produced and designed in the Grand Ducal workshops. Three subjects form the focal points of the research: Florentine scenography from stage to pietre dure, paragone and the line of sculpture, statuettes and preciousness.