Biography

Daniel Zolli is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s History of Art & Architecture department, where his research has focused on aspects of medieval and early modern Italian art, and fifteenth-century Florentine sculpture in particular. His work is united by an interest in the material, the technical, and the procedural in art. His dissertation aims to historicize the heterodox working methods, and workshop organization, of Donatello. He is exploring, especially, how revisions to the bottega model in the early Quattrocento allowed the sculptor and his affiliates to bring into contact formerly isolated professions, media, and ideas; and how in turn such interactions might account for the period’s most daring sculptural innovations. To this end, his reading at I Tatti will zero in on Quattrocento artists’ own “sources,” whether poetry, recipe books, panegyrics by local humanists, or art-theoretical tracts.