Adriano Aymonino is Director of the University of Buckingham’s undergraduate History and History of Art Programme and Programme Director of the MA Art Market, Provenance and the History of Collecting. He received a BA in History of Art from the Sapienza Università di Roma, an MA in Cultural and Intellectual History 1300-1650 from the Warburg Institute, and a PhD in Theories and History of Art from the IUAV and the Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari. He has held various grants and fellowships, including ones awarded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University), the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Prior to joining the University in 2012, he worked as head of research for the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, based in London.
A specialist in the reception of the classical tradition in the early modern period, Adriano’s research focuses on visual culture in the age of the Enlightenment and the Grand Tour, with a specific attention to Britain and the dynamics of exchange between the Mediterranean world and the north of Europe. His research interests include the teaching of art and the evolution of art theory in the Early Modern period; the interactions between the theories and practices of art and architecture; the relationship between patronage and collecting with epistemology and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century; and the materials and mediums of art and architecture.
He has published widely on the reception of the classical tradition, as well as on the visual arts more generally in Early Modern Europe. His last book, Enlightened Eclecticism, published by Yale University Press in 2021, examines the role played by patronage and collecting in shaping visual and material culture in eighteenth-century England. He has co-edited La vita delle mostre, and West Wycombe House (for the Paul Mellon Centre’s Art and the Country House project), and he is now working with Eloisa Dodero on a new edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique, which will be published by Brepols in 2022.
Adriano has curated several exhibitions such as Paper Palaces: the Topham Collection as a source for British Neo-Classicism (2013); Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal (2015); and Roma-Londra. Scambi, modelli e temi tra l’Accademia di San Luca e la cultura artistica britannica tra XVIII e XIX secolo (2018-19).
He is currently working on a book on Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (with Silvia Davoli, MIT Press, 2022) and on a digital platform: Adam Grand Tour Online (with Colin Thom; from 2023 on open access via the Sir John Soane’s Museum’s website). Adriano has also started a new project, The Compass and the Flesh: The Classical Body as Architectural Body, which explores the relationship between theories of proportion and those of architecture, the antique and anatomy in the definition of the ideal body and the canon in the context of the European art academy (16th-19th centuries).
He is associate editor for the Journal of the History of Collections and a Member of the Advisory Board of the Museo del Bargello, Florence. Adriano is also the convenor of The University of Buckingham Research Seminars in the History of Art.
Teaching
Surveys
- Classical to Early Medieval Art
- Renaissance Art
- Baroque to Neoclassical Art
- Romanticism to Fin-de-Siècle: 1800-1900
- Modern Art from 1900
Other courses
- Introduction to Art History
- Research Skills in History and History of Art
- Critical Concepts and Developments in Art History
- The Age of the Enlightenment
- Country House: Form, Function, Culture
- Fin de Siècle Vienna 1880-1920
PhD supervisions
- Vivien Bird: ‘The Collection of Classical Antiquities of Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824): Antiquarianism and Connoisseurship in the Age of Enlightenment’.
- Albertina Ciani: Analysis of the British sculptural production of Italian artists in the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning from the activity of Baron Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867) and Raffaele Monti (1818-1881).
Publications
Authored Books
Aymonino and S. Davoli, Paper marbles: Pier Leone Ghezzi’s ‘Studio di Molte Pietre’ (1726), MIT Press, 2022.
The Enlightenment on paper. The album by Jean Louis Fesch in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland, London, Roxburghe Club, 2023.
Edited Books
Aymonino and I. Tolic (eds), La vita delle mostre, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 2007.
Aymonino and E. Dodero (eds), Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. The lure of classical sculpture 1500-1900: a revised, updated and extended edition, Turnhout, Brepols, 2022.
Exhibition Catalogues
Aymonino, C. Brook, G.P. Consoli (eds), Roma-Londra. Scambi, modelli e temi tra l’Accademia di San Luca e la cultura artistica britannica nel XVIII secolo (text also in English), Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, 2020.
Articles and Book Chapters
‘La pala di San Pantalon di Paolo Veronese: immagine devozionale e manifesto politico’, Venezia 500, XV, 2005, n. 30, pp. 159-200.
‘Gli spazi del collezionismo nella prima epoca Stuart: un difficile inizio’, in A. Aymonino and I. Tolic (eds), La vita delle mostre, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 2007, pp. 55-72.
‘Decorum and celebration of the family line: Robert Adam’s monuments to the first Duchess of Northumberland’, Burlington Magazine, CLII, May 2010, pp. 288-96.
‘Syon House e l’uso delle fonti antiquarie nella decorazione inglese del Settecento’, in C. Brook and V. Curzi (eds), Roma e l’antico. Visione e realtá nel Settecento, exh. cat., Turin, Skira, 2010, pp. 207-12.
Aymonino and A. Cosma, ‘Mattia Preti a Malta’, in C. Conforti and N. Marconi (eds), La Valletta: città, architettura e costruzione sotto il segno della fede e della guerra, Rome, Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello stato, 2011, pp. 3-20.
‘The Musaeum of the 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776) at Northumberland House in London’, in S. Bracken, A. M. Gáldy and A. Turpin (eds), Women collectors, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 101-120.
‘Tommaso Maria Conca’s drawing with the Chariot of the Sun: a cosmological scheme for the Borghese family’, Getty Research Journal, V, 2013, pp. 29–40.
‘The fortune of the Borghese Dancers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art and decoration’, in G. Capitelli, S. Grandesso and C. Mazzarelli (eds), Roma fuori di Roma: l’esportazione dell’arte moderna da Pio VI all’unità (1775-1870), Rome, Campisano, 2013, pp. 477-92.
‘Eighteenth-century British painting and its audience: the “Rule of Taste” and mercantile society’, in C. Brook and V. Curzi (eds), Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner: British Painting and the Rise of Modernity, exh. cat., Turin, Skira, 2014, pp. 3-9.
‘Nature perfected’: the theory & practice of drawing after the Antique’, in A. Aymonino and A. Varick Lauder (eds), Drawn from the Antique: artists and the classical ideal, exh. cat., Haarlem, Teylers Museums, London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015, pp. 15-77.
Aymonino and M. Guerci, ‘The architectural transformation of Northumberland House under the 7th Duke of Somerset and the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, 1748-86’, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 96, 2016, pp. 315-61.
‘Syon House’, ‘Somerset House’, in C. Van Eck and S. De Jong (eds), The Blackwell’s Companion to 18th– Century Architecture, Chichester, Wiley, 2017.
Aymonino and M. Guerci, ‘The refurbishment of Northumberland House. Craftsmen and interior decoration in mid-eighteenth-century London town houses’, in S. Avery-Quash and K. Retford (eds), The London Town House, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 71-98.
‘‘The true style of antique decoration’: Agostino Brunias and the birth of Adam’s style at Kedleston Hall and Syon House’, in C. Thom (ed.), Robert Adams and his brothers. New light on Britain’s leading architectural family, Historic England, London, pp. 104-22.
‘Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino: its foundational role in the theory of Classicism and its eighteenth-century revival’, Artibus et Historiae, vol. 78, 2019, pp. 201-18.
Aymonino and M. Modolo, ‘“An advantage for the Learned & Virtuoso Republick”: dessins d’après l’antique dans l’Angleterre des débuts du XVIIIe siècle’, in M.-L. Fabréga-Dubert (ed.), La collection Borghèse dans le Recueil Topham, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2019, pp. 25-33.
Aymonino and C. Hornsby, ‘Sir Francis Dashwood’s house at West Wycombe Park: a Dilettante’s Pantheon’, Art and the Country House, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University), 2020 (https://doi.org/10.17658/ACH/WWE516).
Aymonino, ‘Playing with the Canon: West Wycombe Park’s iconography and the principle of citation’, Art and the Country House, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University), 2020 (https://doi.org/10.17658/ACH/WWE519)
Aymonino, ‘Object in focus: Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda Romanarum Antiquitatum ac veteris Sculpturae vestigia . . ., Rome, 1693’, Art and the Country House, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University), 2020 (https://doi.org/10.17658/ACH/WWE520)
Aymonino, ‘The Roman model and the development of the London academy: the training system of the Society of Arts 1758-1767’, in A. Aymonino, C. Brook, G.P. Consoli (eds), Roma-Londra. Scambi, modelli e temi tra l’Accademia di San Luca e la cultura artistica britannica nel XVIII secolo (text also in English), Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, 2020, pp. 43-62, 235-43.
Aymonino and E. Dodero, ‘“The smell of stone’: Rubens and the statues of Rome’ in D. Gasparotto (ed.) Rubens and the Antique, exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2021.
Need to find someone else? Visit our Staff Finder