The Department of Art History welcomes David Zagoury (Postdoctoral Fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation) as a Visiting Post-Doctoral Scholar in Early Modern Art at the University of Toronto. Dr. Zagoury will be working with Professor Evonne Levy from 1 March 2022–31 August 2022.
David received his PhD from the University of Cambridge with a thesis on the notion of “fantasia” in sixteenth-century Italian art and artistic theory. His dissertation, supervised by Alexander Marr, explores conceptions of the imagination and its role in innovation, visual thinking and spectatorship in Northern Italy from Leonardo’s death up to the Counter-Reformation. It has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal and will appear as a book in the series of the Roman Studies of the Bibliotheca Hertziana at the end of this year. Since completing his doctorate in 2018, David has been a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and a Fellow of the Getty Research Institute. Prior to coming to Toronto under the sponsorship of Evonne Levy, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, under the sponsorship of Alexander Nagel. David’s recent work focuses on reversible images, namely pictures which were meant to be held and turned in one’s hands to reveal hidden figures. He investigates their role as vectors of reflexive spectatorship in the age of Reformation. He is also interested in iconographic ambivalence, the material culture of drink and festivity, and the role of images in the construction of political utopias in the pre-modern world.
Main research interests:
- theories of the imagination
- pre-modern interactive and moving images
- visual ambivalence
- material culture of festivity
- political agency of images
Selected publications (available on snf.academia.edu/DavidZagoury):
- “Vasari’s Castle in the Air”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 81, 2018, pp. 249-267
- “Minerva in the Forge of Vulcan: Ingegno, Fatica and Imagination in Early Florentine Art Theory”, in Christoph Lüthy, Paul Bakker, Claudia Swan and Claus Zittel (eds.), Image, Imagination and Cognition. Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, Leiden & Boston: Brill (InterSections vol. 55), 2018, pp. 61-93
- “Ut pictura somnium? On a Hieroglyphic Dream by Vasari”, Marlen Schneider and Christiane Solte-Gresser (eds.), Traum und Inspiration. Transformationen eines Topos in Literatur, Kunst und Musik, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018, pp. 57-74