简介

Robert Williams is the author of the books: Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge, 1997); Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2004; Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) which has been translated into Chinese and Korean. With Thomas Frangenberg he translated Francesco Bocchi's The Beauties of the City of Florence: A Guidebook of 1591 (Harvey Miller, 2006) and edited The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2006). With James Elkins he has edited Renaissance Theory (Routledge, 2008) and, with Peter Mack, Visual Interests: The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Baxandall (Ashgate, forthcoming). His recent articles include "Virtus Perficitur: On the Meaning of Donatello's Bronze David," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 53 (2009), 217-28, and "Das Eine im Wandel: Music and Kunstwissenschaft," Journal of Art Historiography, 1, 2009. In 2012 he curated The Zodiac of Wit: Peter Meller and the Graphic Imagination, at UCSB's Art, Design and Architecture Museum; a related exhibition will go on view at Gallery 27 in London in April 2013. His current projects include Raphael's Modernity: Italian Renaissance Art and the Systematicity of Representation, a study that, by drawing upon the evidence of texts such as Vasari's biography as well as the work of the artist and his followers, seeks to expose fundamental aspects of Raphael's achievement that have been neglected by modern scholarship: the emergence of "synthetic" or "critical" imitation as a creative technique, the understanding of decorum as a principle implying the deeper systematicity of representation, and the rationalization of labor documented in the organization of his workshop.