Biography

Joost Keizer is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art at Yale. His research focuses on Italian Renaissance art, from 1300 to 1550, in particular art and politics, allegory, and realism. His first book, Michelangelo and the Politics of Art (forthcoming with Yale University Press, 2014) studies Michelangelo’s response to political change in the city of Florence during the last decade of the fifteenth century and first decades of the sixteenth century. A second book, Life and Work, studies the depiction of contemporary life in the art of Piero della Francesca.

Project Summary

This project focuses on a series of allegorical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. The drawings look deliberately unnatural and strange. Some of them are accompanied by explanatory notes in Leonardo’s hand, others come with no such information. The aim of my project is to study these drawings as a category.