Biography

Anne L. Williams is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Hong Kong. Her research addresses histories of parody and subversion, masculinity and sanctity, and rhetoric in visual culture from c. 1300 to 1550. She is the author of Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550 (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), as well as articles published in Gesta, IKON, and the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. She is the recipient of a 2024 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Germany, as well as grants from the Renaissance Society of America, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.

Project Summary

Imago humilis investigates the history of humor in sacred art of the early Italian Renaissance, reconstructing its role in fresco cycles, altarpieces, manuscripts, and drawings that often complicate modern conceptions of blasphemy. Revealing the extensive presence, context, and reception of parody and play in depictions of the sacred, the project advances the recent ‘sensory’ or ‘experiential’ turn, exploring art and history through the lens of lived experiences and emotions, and bridging the perceived divide between ‘profane’ humor and sacred experience. Research at I Tatti will be devoted particularly to examining visual parody and the ‘marginal’ in illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as their relationships to forms of visual parody across the Mediterranean. A related digital project in progress will offer a public-facing educational companion to the manuscript’s analysis of frescoes, capturing the three-dimensional nature of visual interplay between the walls.