Carolina Mangone

Position
Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology
Title
Graduate Placement Officer
Office Phone
Office
1N-8 Green Hall
Bio/Description

Profile

Carolina Mangone specializes in Renaissance and Baroque art, with varied interests in concepts and practices of imitation and originality, of materials and intermateriality, of finish and unfinishedness, as well as in modes of visualizing religious ideas and their histories, and in the afterlives of early modern masters in text and image.

Her forthcoming book, Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale University Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini’s persistent and wide-ranging imitation of Michelangelo’s canon of art. Investigating the exchange between theory and practice in Bernini’s “imitatio Buonarroti,” she recuperates a set of norms that pervade his diverse production over seven decades in papal Rome. Through close analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, architectural ornament, and the design of New Saint Peter’s, Mangone reveals how Bernini approached Michelangelo’s art as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciled—here with daring license, there with creative restraint—to the changed aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his era. 

Mangone is currently immersed in a new book project, Imperfect Michelangelo: Nonfinito and the Limits of Marble Sculpture, the first monographic examination of the emergence and reception of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures. An invention of idiosyncratic artistic practice, of art theory, and of collecting strategies, combined, no other art was so delimited in the period to a single artist than the non-finito to Michelangelo. Departing from studies that seek a hermeneutics of the unfinished in Michelangelo’s writing and practice alone, this project casts a broader net: first, by reading his incomplete sculpture alongside the cultural aesthetics of the fragment and the rising interest in preparatory practices and works; and, second, by analyzing various responses to his unfinished sculpture during his lifetime and beyond—instances of display, reproduction, critical discourse, and emulation. The non-finito this project presents is multivalent—as desirable as it was disruptive—its ambiguities sustaining interpretation as pure ideation, as raw matter, as facture arrested, as becoming, as erasure, and even, as finished.

In addition to these projects, Mangone is the co-editor, with Evonne Levy, of Material Bernini (Ashgate, 2016), an anthology that investigates Bernini’s works in clay, marble, bronze, and paint, as well as the historical and scholarly writings on them, from a material perspective.

Mangone’s teaching encourages collective discovery in courses that invite students to break new ground in familiar realms of study:  the arts of self-inscription (portraiture, biography, autobiography); the incomplete work of art; the materials of sculpture and their dialogues with painting, drawing, and architecture; imitations, fakes, and originals; and religion and its modes of representation. She also regularly teaches for Princeton’s HUM sequence.

Before joining the Princeton faculty, Mangone was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her scholarship 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, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where she held a Joseph F. McCrindle Graduate Curatorial Fellowship in the departments of sculpture and of prints and drawings. While at Princeton, Mangone has been the recipient of various awards, including the Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors in the School of Historical Studies at the IAS (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) from 2017–2018, and the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC) from 2019–2020.

Education

Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2012

Selected Publications

Bernini’s Michelangelo (Yale University Press, 2020) 

Material Bernini, anthology co-edited with Evonne Levy (Routledge, 2016)  

“Displaying Michelangelo’s Non-finito” in Purity and Contamination: The Materials, Processes and Practices of Early Modern Art and Architecture, eds. Lauren Anne Jacobi and Daniel Zolli (Amsterdam University press, forthcoming).  

“Vernacular Vignola,” Art in Translation 10, 1 (2018): 30–54.  

“Bernini scultore pittoresco,” in Material Bernini, eds. Evonne Levy and Carolina Mangone(London: Routledge, 2016), 69–104.  

“Like Father, Like Son: Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Filial Imitation of Michelangelo,” in TheorizingImitation in the Visual Arts: Global Contexts, ed. Paul Duro (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 69–89.[reissue of article in special themed edition of Art History 37.4 (2014): 666–687].  

Review of exhibition and catalogue, Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, ed. Ian Wardropper et al. (Yale University Press, 2012), in Sculpture Journal 22 (2013).

Review of exhibition and catalogue, Bernini and the Birth of the Baroque Portrait, ed. Andrea Bacchi et al. (J. P. Getty Museum, 2008), in caa.reviews.

Review of exhibition and catalogue, Bernini Pittore, ed. Tomaso Montanari, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (Silvana, 2007), in caa.reviews.

Field(s)
Baroque Art and Architecture
Renaissance Art and Architecture
Home Department and Other Affiliations
Art & Archaeology
Canadian Studies
Italian Studies
Renaissance and Early Modern Studies