I am privileged to serve as Director of the Institute of Fine Arts as well as being a professor of art history at the Institute. My area of specialization is Italian Renaissance art. Candidly, my choice of that field grew out of an enduring attachment to Florence, dating from three formative years I spent there between high school and college. For two of those years I was an assistant to Dr. Klara Steinweg, who was completing a volume of the Corpus of Florentine Painting, a project begun by her mentor (and Institute professor), Richard Offner. The work was being published by the Institute, which became my first as well as my current employer. Dr. Steinweg’s meticulous erudition both inspired and daunted me. Her example taught me the necessity of achieving intimate knowledge of the works being studied as physical objects and as products of their histories, material and textual. Subsequently, as an undergraduate student at Yale and in my graduate work at the Courtauld Institute (M.A.) and Harvard (PhD), I roamed through various fields, among them American decorative arts and material culture, English eighteenth-century art, and Islamic art, as well as gaining experience as a museum intern and gallery guide. My academic itinerary eventually led me back to Italy, and I wrote my dissertation on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Investigating sources represents an underlying theme in my research, be they objects or texts. So, too, are questions of placements and displacements and transformations over time – transformations in form and in forms of understanding and interpretation. After publishing my book, Giorgio Vasari. Art and History (Yale University Press, 1995), I moved from a textual and biographical study to a project that was contextual and one that would give me a chance to explore the rich resources of the Archivio di Stato in Florence. The resulting book, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-century Florence (Yale University Press, 2007) is a work of socio-cultural art history.