Biography

Anna Majeski received a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2022. Anna’s research focuses on intersections between art and science in Renaissance Italy, including the relationship between the production of images and knowledge, and scientific imagery as an arena for articulating emergent concepts of art. Her doctoral dissertation examined a remarkable series of astrological fresco cycles completed in Padua between 1300 and 1440 and was supported by a predoctoral fellowship in Medieval Studies from the American Academy in Rome. Between fall 2022 and summer 2024, Anna was Mellon Foundation Exhibition Research Fellow and then Exhibitions Researcher at the American Philosophical Society, Library & Museum, where she curated an exhibition on American natural history from 1750 to 1850 and authored the accompanying catalog. As a postdoctoral fellow at Villa I Tatti Anna is researching her monograph, Powerful Images: Art and Astrology in Renaissance Italy.

Project Summary

The fifteenth-century astrological image served as a critical arena for articulating the power of art during the Italian Renaissance. Astrology was a scientific worldview built around the agency of images and the premise that celestial forms shaped earthly bodies and minds. It extended this belief to manmade astrological talismans or images, composites of a material substrate, the influx of celestial virtues, and an appropriate pictorial figure. However, skeptics like Thomas Aquinas questioned the legitimacy of these images—products of artifice that purported to participate in the order of nature and the power of the heavens. In response, defenders of the astrological image developed a sophisticated natural-philosophical armature that accounted for their efficacy and overcame the art-nature divide. Albert the Great described the astrological image as more than mere manmade artifact—these objects were collaborations between art and nature, artisan and celestial forces, as well as human creator and dynamic natural material. Against this rich backdrop of late medieval science, during the trecento and quattrocento the artist’s capacity to emulate nature became a mark of the highest skill. For painters and sculptors from the time of Giotto, the astrological image would provide a milieu for arguing that their art was not simply an imitation of the natural world and its celestial forces, but also participated in it. This project examines the artistic practices, visual argumentation, and metapictorial strategies painters and sculptors used to articulate the astrological efficacy of their art through case studies across fifteenth-century Italy.