In Rome I will continue investigating the short-lived yet spectacular moment of the frescoed and graffitied facades of later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Rome. The legacy of these once-celebrated decorated façades eroded over time, thus leaving the role they played in the dynamic field of sixteenth-century Roman art vastly understudied despite the potential these façades have for sharing insights into modes of artistic exchange, practices in self-fashioning, and the larger nature of the era’s evolving urban landscape.

To continue my goal to revive interest in this facet of Renaissance visual culture, my time at the American Academy in Rome will provide me much-needed access to the myriad resources of the city of Rome—including the wealth of materials housed within AAR’s Library and Photographic Archives—to further refine components of my forthcoming book, The Frescoed Façade in Renaissance Roman Visual Culture, and to continue cultivating a digital database, Saving Faces, that will eventually serve as the foundations for a future publicly accessible digital-humanities visualization that both maps and archives the tradition’s rapidly vanishing remnants.