Biography

Alexis Culotta (Art History, Tulane University) examines how competition, collaboration, and innovation shaped artistic and architectural practice primarily in Renaissance Rome. She explored these dynamics through Raphael’s networks in Tracing the Visual Language of Raphael’s Circle to 1527 (Brill 2020), analyzing how his style built from visual quotations shaped his workshop. She continued by examining similar networks of frescoed façade makers and images in The Frescoed Façade in Renaissance Roman Visual Culture (AUP 2025). Her focus on artistic networks informs her digital humanities (DH) project, the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT), alongside ongoing current research on the genealogy of early modern visual aesthetics. Her work has been supported by the NEH, Getty Research Institute, American Academy in Rome, Kress Foundation, RSA, IAS, and NFAH.

Project Summary

Renaissance Roman frescoed and sgraffitoed façades were a fleeting yet dazzling flourish within the era’s architectural ambitions and constituted a dynamic yet ephemeral layer to the city’s urban fabric. Though central to artistic exchange, streetside identity, and all’antica evocations in the period, these faces today survive only in fragments, from hints in deteriorating plaster to partial drawings, prints, and texts. SavingFaces seeks to bring them back into focus by assembling a database of more than 200 documented sites across Rome’s historic center, integrating visual, archival, and spatial data to reimagine this lost layer of the city’s visual culture. Building on prior research and further melding traditional art historical methods with DH approaches, specifically the ANT platform, this project will deepen the database with additional documentation of Roman sites, incorporate geospatial mapping, and broad its geographic scope to conceptually map how this art form manifested across the Italian peninsula in this period. The result will be a publicly accessible version of SavingFaces representing an evolving resource that reassembles lost works, enables new discoveries between fragments, and enhances overall the potential of data-driven humanistic inquiry into both early modern artistic exchange and urban culture.