UMass Boston

Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture

PhD, Columbia University, 2014

• The Performance of Sculpture in Renaissance Venice (New York, Routledge, 2022)
• “Where Disegno Goes to Die: Constructing the Myth of a Venice without Drawing.” In Venetian Disegno. New Frontiers. Edited by Maria Aresin and Thomas Dalla Costa (London: Paul Holberton Ltd., 2023). (In press)
• “On the Separation of the Arts in Venice: A Neglected Passage from the Statutes of the Stonemasons’ Guild.” Source. Notes in the History of Art 4.3 (2021): 143-152.
• "Tullio Lombardo, Antonio Rizzo, and Sculptural Audacity in Renaissance Venice," in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 259-280.
• "The Quest for Official Commissions.” In Tintoretto. Artist of Renaissance Venice. Exhibition catalogue, ed. Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2018), pp. 134-143.
• Review of B. Paul, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (2016), Renaissance Quarterly 71.1 (2018): 240-242.
• “Revisiting the Frari’s High Altarpiece: The Assunta Frame and Titian as Regisseur.” In Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Immagini di devozione e spazi della fede. Edited by Carlo Corsato and Deborah Howard (Padova, 2015), 223-232.
• “A Charitable Façade? The Sculptural Decoration of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.” Confraternitas 21 (2010): 6-16

Lorenzo G. Buonanno specializes in the art of Venice. In his recent work he has examined the principles of making and viewing Venetian Renaissance sculpture, as well as its unusual critical fortune. He is interested in the ways in which artists interact professionally and translate ideas across media, the interplay between technical and intellectual processes in the creation of works of art, and the ways in which viewers react to different object types.

Professor Buonanno has presented papers and lectures in the United States and Europe, and has organized numerous conference sessions dedicated to early modern sculpture and to Venetian art. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Columbia University, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America. His first book, The Performance of Sculpture in Renaissance Venice, was published in 2022. He is currently also Chair of the Catherine Scott Frisone Center for Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in Memory of John. B. Frisone. His current projects include: essays on the historiography of Venetian art, an edited volume on altar and altarpieces in the "Venetian Mediterranean," and studies on climate, environment, and the destruction of fresco painting in Venice.