Andrew Casper
Contact Info
Education
Ph.D. Art History, University of Pennsylvania (2007)
M.A. Art History, University of Pennsylvania (2003)
B.A. Art History, Spanish, University of Michigan (2001)
Prof. Andrew Casper is a specialist of Renaissance and Baroque art of southern Europe, and particularly religious imagery in Italy in the late 1500s and 1600s. His recent research has examined the artistic conception of the Shroud of Turin, looking at how early-modern devotional manuals draw from contemporary art theory to portray the Shroud’s imprint of Christ’s body as a divine work of art. This has culminated in various published essays and a book titled An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Penn State University Press, 2021) which was the winner of the 2022 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. He has previously researched the early career of Domenikos Theotokopoulos “El Greco” and religious art after the Counter Reformation in Italy. He is the author of numerous essays and articles on sixteenth-century icons and the religious paintings from El Greco’s Italian period. His book Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (Penn State University Press, 2014) uses El Greco’s early paintings to advance new ideas concerning the conception of religious imagery after the Council of Trent.
Prof. Casper has presented scholarly work on these and related topics at the conferences of the College Art Association, the Renaissance Society of America, Sixteenth Century Society, and at other national and international venues. He is a recipient of external grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Art History Publication Initiative, College Art Association, Fulbright, Howard Foundation at Brown University, Italian Art Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Newberry Library.
Prof. Casper’s current research examines the artistic, sacred, and scientific portrayal of Christ’s body in Italian devotional painting of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the cult of the miraculous icon of Santa Maria della Consolata in Turin. At Miami he teaches courses in Renaissance and Baroque art in Europe and Latin America. He was a 2012 finalist for the E. Phillips Knox Teaching Award, the university’s highest recognition for innovative teaching, and is the winner of the 2014 Miami University Distinguished Teaching Award.
Selected Publications
Books
An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021)
(Winner of the 2022 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.)
Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014)
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“Original Copies: The Newest Reproductions of the Shroud of Turin,” Material Religion 19.4 (2023) (forthcoming).
“Locating Powers in Early-Modern Religious Imagery,” in Powers: A History, ed. Julia Jorati. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
“The Mandylions in Genoa and Rome: On the Authenticity of Christ’s True Image in Counter-Reformation Italy,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51.2 (2021): 264-84.
“What does it mean to exhibit the Shroud of Turin online?” Slate.com, April 10, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/shroud-of-turin-virtual-exhibition-easter.html
“Blood Kinetics and Narrative Performance in the Shroud of Turin,” Sixteenth Century Journal 50.2 (2019): 371-97.
“Painting as Relic: Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie Sacre and the Shroud of Turin,” in Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent, ed. Jesse Locker. New York, Routledge, 2018, 278-92.
“(Re)consideración del mestizaje del Greco,” in El Greco: Simposio Internacional 2014. Madrid, Fundación El Greco 2014 and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015, 62-74
“Becoming El Greco,” Apollo: The International Art Magazine 179, no. 618 (March 2014), 114-20.
“Greeks Abroad: (As)signing Artistic Identity in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Studies 28.3 (2014), 356-76.
“Display and Devotion: Exhibiting Icons and Their Copies in Counter-Reformation Italy,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 43-62.
“El Greco’s Heraklion Baptism of Christ: reconsidering dates, signatures, and the madonneri,” in Source: Notes in the History of Art 31.2 (2012), 10-14.
“Icons, Guidebooks, and the Religious Topography of Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Early Modern Rome 1341-1667, ed. Portia Prebys. Ferrara: EDISAI, 2011, 477-87.
“Experiential Vision in El Greco’s Christ Healing the Blind,” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 74.3 (2011), 349-72.
“A Taxonomy of Images: Francesco Sansovino and the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross,” in Word & Image 26.1 (2010), 100-14.
“El Greco, the Veronica and the Art of the Icon,” in Nicos Hadjinicolaou, ed., El Greco’s Studio: Proceedings of the International Symposium, ed. Nicos Hadjinicolaou. Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2007, 135-48.
Reviews
Book Review: Alessandro Giardino, Corporeality and Performativity in Baroque Naples, in Renaissance Quarterly, forthcoming.
Book Review: Catherine R. Puglisi and William L. Barcham, New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows, in Speculum 90.2 (2015), 579-81.
Book Review: Jodi Cranston, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Later Paintings, in Sixteenth Century Journal 42.2 (2011), 592-93.
Book Review: Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne, eds., Forms of Faith in Sixteenth Century Italy, in Renaissance Quarterly 63.2 (2010), 646-47.
Exhibition Review: The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete, in The Newsletter of the Italian Art Society 12.1 (2010), 4-5.
Pedagogical Materials
"Greek painters in renaissance Venice," in Smarthistory, June 6, 2021.
https://smarthistory.org/greek-painters-renaissance-venice/
“The altar tabernacle, Pauline Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome," in Smarthistory, June 6, 2021.
https://smarthistory.org/altar-tabernacle-pauline-chapel-santa-maria-maggiore/
Academia.edu: muohio.academia.edu/
