Luca Palozzi

Luca Palozzi is Associate Professor in the History of Medieval Art.

He holds a PhD in Art History from the Scuola Normale Superiore. Before joining the Università di Pisa in 2022, he held academic positions at Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the University of Edinburgh. His research has been supported by the Kress Foundation, the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, the British Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Association of Art Historians (now Association for Art History).

He specializes in medieval Italian art, namely sculpture, with an emphasis on the relationship between art theory and practice; the dialectic between the different artistic media; materials and techniques; as well as issues of artistic geography, historiography and style.

He is also interested in porosities between medieval science and art, in ideas of 'naturalism' and 'the real', and in how knowledge of the natural world was experienced, created, organized, and shared during the Middle Ages. He has worked with Ariella Minden on the topic of artistic failure, and an edited volume is underway.

Research events organized include the exploratory seminars "Casting the Real in the Middle Ages" (with Emanuele Lugli), that were held at the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of York in 2017, and at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. In 2020, he co-organized with Ariella Minden and Alessandro Nova the international conference "Failure: Understanding Art as Process, 1150-1750" at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. In 2025, he organized with Gregor Meinecke and Vera-Simone Schulz the international conference "Pseudo-scripts. (Il)legibility & Ornamentation" at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in international journals, such as the "Burlington Magazine", "Source", the "Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz", and the "Sculpture Journal".