Scholarship and Biography
Jonathan Unglaub (BA, University of Michigan, MA, M Phil, Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University. He has taught previously at Columbia and Washington University in St. Louis. At Brandies since 2001, Unglaub teaches courses on the Art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods throughout Europe, with an emphasis on Italy. A primary area of research focus has been the art and larger literary culture of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the founder of French Classicism, who worked in Rome. His scholarship on the painter encompasses two books: Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge University Press, 2006; paperback 2014) and Poussin's Sacrament of Ordination: History Faith and the Sacred Landscape (Yale University Press, 2013), as well as some half dozen published studies. He is completing a monograph on the painter that will appear in the Renaissance Lives series published by Reaktion Press. Beyond Poussin, Unglaub's current research ranges across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, and includes studies on Caravaggio, Carracci, Bernini, Sebastiano del Piombo, Bolognese painting, and Venetian Renaissance pastoral painting, as well as a book project on pictorial transitivity and Marian corporeality in Raphael's Sistine Madonna and other Renaissance images of the Incarnation. Among other issues, these articles have addressed Giorgione's Concert Champêtre and the historical dimension of pastoral poetry in the Renaissance, the cutthroat patronage of Giovanni Battista Manzini in seventeenth-century Bologna, new literary sources for Bernini's famed Ecstasy of Santa Teresa, the presence and legacy of Michelangelo in Guercino's monumental Saint Petronilla altarpiece for Saint Peter's, and a rediscovered portrait of Bernardo Accolti, attributed to Andrea Del Sarto, which confirms this once-celebrated poet's prominence in Raphael's Parnassus in the Vatican. His scholarship and reviews have appeared in many venues, including the Art Bulletin, Art History, Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, Arion, caareviews, Histoire de l’Art, the Art Newspaper, as well as chapters in various scholarly anthologies.