Rate My Professor Diana Presciutti

Presciutti's research centers on the visual culture of social problems, popular piety, and institutional charity in late medieval and early modern Italy between 1350 and 1650, encompassing devotional practices, urban and extra-urban ritual, civic ideology, and intersections of class, gender, and cultural production. Her research interests include the social history of art, reception theory, visual hagiography, print cultures, histories of institutional charity, confraternities and lay religiosity, pilgrimage and mobility, gender and sexuality studies, and art and ecology. She is the author of several influential books, including Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which analyzes how miracle images by mendicant saints influenced views of social issues like vendetta, adultery, infanticide, marital violence, gossip, and madness; Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy (Ashgate, 2015), on the visual strategies employed by patrons and artists in foundling hospitals; and Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City (Brill, 2017). Key articles include "Dead Infants, Cruel Mothers, and Heroic Popes: The Visual Rhetoric of Foundling Care at the Hospital of Santo Spirito, Rome" (Renaissance Quarterly, 2011) and "Miracles in Monochrome: Grisaille in Visual Hagiography" (Art History, 2019). Presciutti was awarded the Melville J. Kahn Postdoctoral Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2017-18). Her ongoing projects include Printing the Miraculous: Gender, Popular Religion and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy and Roadside Religion: Visual Culture, Ecology, and Everyday Devotion in Renaissance Italy.