Professor Geraldine A. Johnson

(c) John Cairns

Associate Professor of the History of Art; Fellow of Christ Church

Christ Church

01865 286 830

geraldine.johnson@hoa.ox.ac.uk

Much of my research has focused on the history of sculpture from the late Medieval period to the present day, as well as on the visual arts more generally in Early Modern Europe. I have also worked on the history of photography, the historiography of Art History, and women and the visual arts. I have published on subjects ranging from the sculpture of Donatello and Rubens's female patrons, to art historians' reliance on photography and the contemporary sculptor Richard Serra.

Research Interests

Early Modern Art and Culture
History of Sculpture: Late Medieval to Contemporary
Women and the Visual Arts
History of Photography
Historiography of Art History

I am the co-editor of a prize-winning volume entitled Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and the editor of Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In 2005, Oxford University Press published my book Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction, which has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Romanian, Turkish, Thai and Vietnamese. I recently published a co-edited volume, Photo Archives and the Place of Photography (Routledge 2025) and I have edited a field-defining collection of 30 essays entitled Art History Now: Theories, Methods, Approaches (Routledge, forthcoming 2025). I am currently completing a monograph entitled Photography and Sculpture, which will be published by Reaktion Books, and I am also working on a second monograph, The Sound of Marble: The Materiality and Immateriality of Italian Renaissance Art. With Dr Leah Clark, I am co-curating a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum entitled Sensory Worlds of the Global Renaissance, which will open in 2027.

Academia.edu research page

History of Art Department webpage

Photo Archives and the Place of Photography, co-edited with Deborah Schultz (Routledge, 2025).

This collection of chapters investigates the effects of mobility and place on a range of photographic archives and explores their potential for cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The book explores photographic images used in the study of art, as well as the implications of placing European images of non-European cultures in an archive, album, library, or museum. It also addresses questions of digital space, which renders images more visually accessible, but further complicates issues relating to location.

“‘To know them thoroughly you must have their photographs’: Reproducing Donatello’s Sculpture in the Later Nineteenth Century,” The Sculpture Journal, vol. 34 (2025): 171-191.

The emergence of photographic media in the mid-nineteenth century led to an explosion in printed reproductions of works of art, with Donatello and other sculptors working in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy being of particular interest to authors and publishers from the early 1860s onwards. The present article traces how statues and reliefs by Donatello and other Italian Renaissance sculptors were illustrated in a wide range of new photographically based media and disseminated through an equally wide range of new printing processes.

“Devotion and the Senses: Engaging Donatello’s Wooden Crucifix in S. Croce,” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 73 (2020): 1179-1234.

The reception of art is often described in ocularcentric terms, but all five senses could engage devotional objects in late medieval and early modern Europe. This article explores this phenomenon by considering a wooden crucifix with movable arms made by Donatello for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence in the early fifteenth century. It makes new suggestions about the work's original location, its possible patrons, and its functions and reception, especially during the rituals associated with Good Friday.

'(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History, Art History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2013): 12-51.

In three ground-breaking articles published in 1896-97 and 1915, which focused primarily on Italian Renaissance sculpture, Heinrich Wölfflin asked: ‘How should one photograph sculpture?’ In trying to answer this question, he became one of the first scholars to consider explicitly the ‘visual historiography’ of Art History as a discipline.

Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Botticelli, Holbein, Leonardo, Dürer, Michelangelo: the names are familiar, as are the works, such as the Last Supper fresco, or the monumental marble statue of David. But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these objects? Was the Renaissance only about great masters and masterpieces, or were "mistresses" also involved, such as women artists and patrons?

New York Times

Renaissance festivities and on Leonardo da Vinci

2024

Daily Mail

Cited in article on new and historic royal portraiture.

2024

CNN

Cited in article on sculpture newly-attributed to Michelangelo.

2018

Round-up of Sunday Papers

Discussed current education topics.

BBC Radio Oxford

2015, 2016, 2017

Medici: Masters of Florence, series 2

Academic consultant for 8-part television series in production with Big Light and Lux Vide, distributed by Netflix on five continents.

2015-16

Woman’s Hour

Discussed depicting famous women on banknotes

BBC Radio 4

2015

I would like to hear from potential DPhil students regarding History of Art and Visual/Material Culture.

I currently teach:

Prelims	FHS	Masters
European Art 1400-1900	Approaches to the History of Art	Women, Art and Culture in Early Modern Europe
Antiquity after Antiquity	Court Culture and Art in Early Modern Europe	Theory and Methods in the History of Art

Professor Geraldine A. Johnson

Featured Publications

Photo Archives and the Place of Photography, co-edited with Deborah Schultz (Routledge, 2025).

“‘To know them thoroughly you must have their photographs’: Reproducing Donatello’s Sculpture in the Later Nineteenth Century,” The Sculpture Journal, vol. 34 (2025): 171-191.

“Devotion and the Senses: Engaging Donatello’s Wooden Crucifix in S. Croce,” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 73 (2020): 1179-1234.

'(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual Historiography of Art History, Art History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2013): 12-51.

Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)

In the Media

New York Times

Daily Mail

CNN

Round-up of Sunday Papers

Medici: Masters of Florence, series 2

Woman’s Hour

Current DPhil Students

Teaching

Department of History of Art

Publications