Carolina Mangone is a historian of Early Modern Art and Architecture. Her scholarship explores concepts and practices of imitating, copying, simulating, and faking; the materials and techniques of art and their movement across medial and professional boundaries; the traffic in art theoretical concepts across cultures and languages; modes of visualizing religious ideas and their histories; and the afterlives of early modern artists and architects in text and image.

Mangone’s first book, Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale, 2020), examines the contestedness of canonicity in its early modern foundations by studying how Gianlorenzo Bernini constructed an artistic theory through imitating the art and architecture of Michelangelo Buonarroti. This study both resituates Michelangelo’s legacy to a constitutive, if fraught, place in Roman artistic theory and practice and demonstrates how Bernini approached this legacy as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciled—with daring license and creative restraint—to the changed aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his era. Mangone is also the co-editor, with Evonne Levy, of Material Bernini (Ashgate, 2016) a collaboration that constitutes the first study of Bernini’s sculptural production—in clay, marble, bronze, and on paper—from material and intermedial perspectives.

Prior to joining the Department of Art & Archeology at Princeton University in 2015, Mangone was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C. She is currently a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities Council at Princeton University (2022-24) and Director of the Program in Italian Studies (2023-27).

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