Maps in the Vatican Palace: Carthography, Power and Representation in the Renaissance

Presented by Valentina Balzarotti, Ph.D. in History of Art from The University of Roma Tre.

Valentina Balzarotti received her M.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Bologna in 2012. She was fellow at the Longhi Foundation from fall 2013 to summer 2014 and in 2015 she obtained her High Specialization Diploma in Historical-Artistic Heritage from the University of Florence. In 2016 she collaborated with the Polo Museale delle Marche and in the autumn of the same year she became Ph.D. candidate at the University of Roma Tre with a dissertation on the Bolognese painter Lorenzo Sabatini, defended in April 2020. Her interests range from the artistic culture of the Mannerist and Counter-Reformation to the setting-up of sacred spaces in the modern age, from the relationship between painting and architecture to artistic interaction and the use of different media in 16th-century decorative sites. Since May 2020 she has become postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana with a project entitled Dalla Galleria delle Carte Geografiche all’Italia di Giovanni Antonio Magini: persistence, recurrence and reworking of Flavio Biondo's model in the cartographic and textual production between the papacy of Gregory XIII to the one of Clement VIII, which investigates the evolution of the historical space of Italy in texts and maps from the related literary and artistic production of the Gregorian period (1572-1585) to Giovanni Antonio Magini’s (1620).