Biography

Morgan Ng is an assistant professor of art history at Yale University whose research retraces forgotten interconnections between architecture, visual culture, and technology in and beyond Renaissance Europe. Ng’s first book, Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy, was published in 2025 by Yale University Press. His essays on subjects such as early modern window glass, cartography, and drawing have appeared in Art History, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Word & Image, and I Tatti Studies, among other journals. His research has recently received support from membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
 

Project Summary

Renaissance people viewed the surfaces of the built and natural environment not as blank spaces, but as substrates charged with graphic potential. Period writings abound with stories of young artists who doodled on walls and floors; painters who invented new figurative imagery by gazing at formless shapes on dirt-stained walls; and miraculous meteorological events that imprinted church plans on the ground. While often embroidered or outright fabricated, these stories reflected real practice. Despite paper’s rising ubiquity as an early modern drawing medium, architects and other practitioners perpetuated far earlier traditions of composing designs with string or drafting directly on buildings, often at full scale. Art historians have often demoted such graphic artifacts as mere disegni esecutivi, with little aesthetic value relative to works on paper. This book project, nearing completion, will recuperate the significance of such artifacts as powerful instruments of knowledge creation as well as cultural, spiritual, and political expression.