Ariella Minden

PhD Candidate (she/her)
ariella.minden@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Early Modern
  • European
  • Book History

Areas of Interest

  • Printmaking
  • History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
  • Media Studies
  • Mediality and Intermediality

Working Dissertation

Title

In Dialogue: Medial Thinking in Bolognese Prints, 1500–1530

Supervisors

Evonne Levy

Description

My dissertation examines Bologna as an innovative centre of printmaking at a critical moment in the media’s development between 1500 and 1530. These thirty years were a dynamic period of activity in which woodcuts, engravings, and etchings in their relative infancy were being negotiated as forms of visual communication within an evolving media landscape. Through a confluence of circumstances, Bologna gave rise and played host to some of the most important practitioners of the period including Peregrino da Cesena, Marcantonio Raimondi, Parmigianino, and Ugo da Carpi, alongside anonymous woodcutters revolutionizing medical illustration. My work considers how a set of paper objects reliant upon new technologies thematize and are communicative on ideas of virtuosity, novelty, failure, expertise, objectivity, and innovation. In doing so, I demonstrate how both artists and some of their most prominent patrons reflected on the potentials of these new media and their relations to and distinctiveness from existing media. By using media theory, this study re-evaluates watershed moments in Italian printmaking and offers a new assessment of the inner-workings of a media revolution.

Biography

Ariella Minden is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and a predoctoral fellow in the research group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana- Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. Having completed her BA at U of T in 2015, she continued her studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London receiving her MA in 2016 with a thesis on the early-sixteenth-century literary reception of Francesco Francia. Minden's doctoral dissertation evaluates Bologna’s role as a centre of printmaking by using media theory as a lens through which to explore the emergence of new artistic technologies. From the study of these practices in their infancy, she developed an interest in the role of failure as a central component of artistic process. This resulted in the organization of the international conference “Failure: Understanding Art as Process, 1150-1750” with Alessandro Nova and Luca Palozzi in November 2020.

Minden has gained curatorial experience at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Gallerie Estensi in Modena. Prior to joining the Bibliotheca Hertziana in March 2022, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut from 2018 to 2022.

Selected Publications

  • with Paolo Savoia, “The Body Between Life and Death: Berengario da Carpi and the Anatomical Imagery of the Sixteenth Century” in Valeria Finucci (ed.), Understanding Medical Humanities (De Gruyter, 2022), 173-204.

Honours, Awards and Grants

  • Doctoral Fellowship, "Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions," Bibliotheca Hertziana- Max Planck Institute for Art History, 2022-2023
  • Doctoral Fellowship, Kunsthistorisches Institut inFlorenz–Max-Planck-Institut, 2018–2022
  • Peter H. Brieger Fellowship, Department of Art History, University of Toronto, 2020
  • Faculty of Arts & Science Top (FAST) Doctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2017–2021
  • Robson Graduate Fellowship, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 2017

Education

MA with Distinction, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
BA (Hons) with High Distinction, Trinity College, University of Toronto

Cohort

  • 2017-2018