Professor Libina specializes in the art of Renaissance Italy, with a focus on artistic responses to the religious controversies of the Catholic Reformation. She is particularly interested in the artistic image as an object of visual attention and devotional engagement. Her work equally deals with questions of materiality and mediality in art 鈥 that is, with the ways images contend with their status as material fictions but also vehicles of knowledge in the early modern period. Libina has published on the devotional painting of Sebastiano del Piombo, revealing the Venetian artist's deep commitment to thinking through the figuration of the divine and the problematic of human mediation of divine truths within early Catholic reform. Libina has also published on works made for artists' academies in Florence and Rome after the Council of Trent as part of her second project, "The Artist as Visionary and the Authority of Pictorial Invention." The project investigates the intersection of discourses on the artist鈥檚 imagination and the dangers of visionary experience in early modern academies of art. In particular, it looks at reform-minded thinkers鈥 attempts to reign in the license of imaginative vision and the rise of works that, despite these attempts, lay claim to the visionary power of the artist.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Books
Sebastiano del Piombo and the Sacred Image: Mediating the Divine in the Age of Reform.聽Turnhout: Brepols, 2022.
Book Reviews
Panels Organized
Panels Chaired
Papers Presented