Michael Cole (B.A., Williams, M.A. and Ph.D., Princeton) taught European Baroque Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before coming to Penn in 2003. His research has focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sculpture, painting, and printmaking. He is particularly interested in historical conceptions of artistic practice, and he has published studies on the use of sculptural materials, on art and science, on visual poetics, and on the formation of the artist in the early modern period.

A former Rome Prize Fellow, Professor Cole is the author of Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, 2002) and the co-editor of Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism (Chapel Hill, 2004); he is the co-curator and catalogue editor of the 2006 exhibition The Early Modern Painter-Etcher. Recent projects include an anthology, co-edited by Rebecca Zorach, on idolatry in the early modern world, as well as articles on Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and on the reception of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting among late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sculptors.

Other Affiliations:

Center for Italian Studies (director, 2005-2006)