Publications

Selected articles, essays, and forthcoming books

Books

• Book · Forthcoming 2027 Intarsia, Painting, and the Germination of Italian Renaissance Art. Princeton University Press.
  

  Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, intarsia (from the Italian "intarsiare" – to inlay) emerged as one of the most important art forms in central and northern Italy. Composed of hundreds of pieces of wood in various colors, textures and tonalities, intarsia panels furnished some of Italy's most important sacred and secular spaces, including the Duomo in Florence, the Santo in Padua, and the studiolo of the Duke of Montefeltro in Urbino. Giorgio Vasari, writing when intarsia was on the wane, famously criticized intarsia's fragility and susceptibility to worms, conditioning centuries of art historians to downplay its importance. My book argues that it was precisely intarsia's organicity – its ecological embeddedness – that contributed to its long-term significance, and links intarsia to painting through a shared interest in trees, wood, and arboreal processes.

Articles and Book Chapters

• Article · Forthcoming Fall 2026 "Toward a Vermicular Theory of Renaissance Art." Sixteenth Century Journal. Recipient of the Carl S. Meyer Prize.
  

  While elusive, woodworms and other worm-like creatures were pervasive in early modern European art, eating their way through woodblock prints and sculpture, canvas supports and book and manuscript pages, leaving elaborate designs (and excrement) in their wake. They also meander conceptually through the spiritual and philosophical terrain of literature and thought: as agents of evil, models of redemption, or, paradoxically, proxies for the divine. Prior studies have treated these creatures as conservation issues, to be neutralized or eradicated, but precisely because they are disruptive, worms (including beetles and moths in their larval form) draw attention to processes of growth, transformation and world-making. Drawing on visual and textual evidence and material encounters by conservators, my paper investigates how the proliferation of new artistic practices and technologies foregrounded the life cycle of worms and bugs, reshaping the human understanding self, earth and cosmos.

• Book Chapter · Forthcoming "The Material Poetics of Trees and Wood in San Giovanni in Bragora," in San Giovanni in Bragora: Chiesa Campo, Comunità, eds. Lorenzo Buonanno and Gianmario Guidarelli (Rome: Viella, forthcoming).
  

  In April 1503, Cima da Conegliano completed a painting on panel for the Altar of the Cross in the Church of San Giovanni in Bragora. The painting, since moved to a position to the right of the door to the sacristy, depicts Emperor Constantine and Saint Helena on either side of an expansive Cross, and in the background a sweeping landscape reminiscent of the hills north of Venice. Prior scholarship has examined the picture's patronage, history and iconography, but my focus is the Cross itself, which draws attention to the wood grain and to the swirling patterns on its surface. I consider the significance of wood in Cima's painting not only as an object of representation, but as a material with important economic and spiritual significance to the devotional community of San Giovanni in Bragora. Together with Cima's Baptism of Christ on the high altar, the painting enlists trees, wood and arboreal processes to explicate Christian themes of death and resurrection and theological questions involving vision and touch. Cima employed a poetry of trees and wood at a time when arboreal resources were top of mind for Venetians whose livelihoods were connected to the supply of timber.

• Article · Spring 2025 "Giovanni Bellini's Bleeding Trees: Animacy and Arboreal Thinking in the Italian Renaissance Stump." I Tatti Studies. PDF ↗
  

  Tree stumps have long been recognized as potent symbols of Christian death and resurrection, but Italian painters in the late fifteenth-century depicted stumps with peculiar and intriguing details: beetles and birds, fungi and lichens, and severed branches that spew blood. Recent studies in the humanities and natural sciences have drawn attention to the philosophical importance of vegetal life in the early modern period: how plants shaped notions of the cosmos, the perpetuity of life, and even the idea of form itself. While much of the attention has focused on trees and plants, it is stumps, the rooted remnants of trees that have been blown down, rotted or cut, they have an exceptional power to provoke. They have the physical properties of trees — trunks, roots and branches — but also display their innards: layers of sapwood, heartwood, and pith. They bear traces of violence, figure the world and spatialize time. Drawing on visual and textual evidence, including land management documents, anatomical drawings, and spiritual and poetic literature, I demonstrate how environmental pressures brought stumps to the fore and how Italian painters engaged with stumps in a "bio-semiotic" discourse to parse the relationship between human and vegetal life.

• Article · December 2024 "Grains, Worms and Stains: Designing from Wood in Early Modern Italy." The Art Bulletin. PDF ↗
  

  Long admired for their illusionistic images, Italian intarsia panels also foregrounded the biological and ecological properties of wood, incorporating its filaments, fungal infections, and even woodworm pathways into depictions of landscapes, still lifes, and saintly figures. Drawing on visual, material, and textual evidence, much of it produced outside of Italy's traditional artistic centers, I show how Italian intarsia makers were designing from wood, provoking new ways of thinking about the human relationship to the arboreal world.

Speaking

Lectures, symposia, and public presentations

For speaking inquiries, please contact me at dbardeen@lacma.org.