Robert Brennan

Dr. Robert Brennan is a Lecturer in Art History in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He is a specialist in Italian art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with research interests in the social history of art, cross-cultural mobility, and discourses of modernity. Brennan earned his PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Following his doctorate, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and the University of Sydney. Prior to joining UQ, he taught at Parsons School of Design (The New School, New York) and worked in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. An affiliate of the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing at UQ, Brennan contributes to art history and curatorship research.

Brennan’s first book, Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy, was published by Harvey Miller in 2019. His peer-reviewed articles include “Arabesques”: The Making and Breaking of a Concept in Renaissance Italy” (The Art Bulletin, 2023), “The Body as Axis of History: Raphael and Michelangelo at Santa Maria della Pace in Rome” (Oxford Art Journal, 2022), and “The Art Exhibition between Cult and Market: The Case of Dürer’s Heller Altarpiece” (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2017). He co-edited Art History before English: Negotiating a European Lingua Franca from Vasari to the Present (Officina Libraria, 2021) with C. Oliver O’Donnell, Marco Mascolo, and Alessandro Nova. Other works encompass book chapters “Not an Eyewitness: The Art of Saint Luke in His Chapel at Santa Giustina” (2021) and “Complicity and Self-Awareness: Giusto de’ Menabuoi at the Santo” (2020). His current monograph project, Thresholds of Art in Renaissance Italy, examines migration and slavery’s impact on art via archival studies of artists including a Syrian metalworker in Venice, an Egyptian textile designer in Ferrara, and West African musicians in Rome. Brennan was awarded the RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History for Venice archival work. He is co-editing Early Modern Imaginaries in the Long Twentieth Century with Katie Anania and Andrew Leach, and Ut pictura medicina? Visual Arts and Medicine with Fabian Jonietz and Romana Sammern.

Professional Email: r.brennan1@uq.edu.au