Profile

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.

Her first book, Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale, 2020), examines the contested criteria of canonicity in its early modern foundations by studying how Gianlorenzo Bernini constructed an artistic theory by imitating the art and architecture of Michelangelo Buonarroti. This study both resituates Michelangelo’s legacy to a constitutive, if fraught, place in Roman baroque artistic theory and practice and demonstrates how Bernini approached this inheritance 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 brings together essays constituting the first study of Bernini’s sculptural production—in clay, marble, bronze, and on paper—from material and intermedial perspectives.

Mangone is currently immersed in a book on Michelangelo’s lifelong penchant for leaving his sculpture rough and unfinished. Challenging the notion that these are unintentionally incomplete works that lie beyond historical contextualization, this project situates the production and reception of Michelangelo’s non-finito sculpture within an expanded period view that in turn accommodates unfinishedness as purposeful and disruptive. It shows that their imperfection—understood as both physical lack of finish and category instability—is imbricated in a wide network of emergent and established artistic concerns, genres, practices, media, and realms of knowledge. The non-finito of this project is multivalent, offering an unwritten chapter on the early modern aesthetics of imperfection. Mangone is also at work on a smaller project that examines the cultural nationalisms attending the translation of Italian Renaissance architectural principles to Europe and beyond, as seen through foreign language re-editions of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture, which from its first printing in the mid-16th century and into the 20th century appeared in hundreds of Latin, French, Spanish, English, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Japanese editions.

Prior to joining the Department of Art & Archeology 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, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington D.C., and I Tatti in Florence. She is also currently Director of Princeton’s Program in Italian Studies (2023–27).

Teaching

Mangone teaches on a wide range of early modern topics across art, visual culture, and architecture that include gender and representation; practices and theories of invention; questions of finish; aesthetics of religious reform; intersections of art and natural history; monstrous images; and im/materiality across the arts. She also regularly co-teaches in Princeton’s undergraduate Humanities Sequence on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture.

Mangone is interested in advising students pursuing graduate study on any aspect of early modern art and architecture, particularly as it intersects with Italian culture.