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Practical matters How to find us dr. J.P. (Joost) Keizer

dr. J.P. (Joost) Keizer

Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Studies

Expertise

Website: https://rug.academia.edu/JoostKeizer

Joost Keizer is a historian of pre-modern European art, with an interest in how pre-modern culture can be communicated to a contemporary audience.

His current research investigates the ethical dimensions of art. He is interested in how the cultural heritage of pre-Modern Europe raises questions about inclusion and exclusion, both in the period itself and in the practice of the modern museum.

He is currently engaged in a project on inclusivity and the museum funded by the Young Academy Groningen, together with Susanne Täuber (Department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior). The project tests a new way of engaging communities in designing exhibitions of the University of Groningen’s ethnographic collection, actively involves students, and results in an exhibition at the University Museum.  

A second project tentatively titled Uncommon Lives: Art and the Ethics of Style in Early Modern Europe , asks why, with a sudden intensity, people began asking ethical questions about art and artists - questions that are still with us today. At the core of the book is a large but forgotten amount of early modern sources on artist’s character and behavior.

He is engaged in a third project on nature and ecology in the Dutch Republic. 

As guest curator at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, he made an exhibition on the woman artist Artemisia Gentileschi and gender roles in early modern Europe.

In his courses, Keizer explores with his students the theories and methods of Art History and other cultural disciplines, with a focus on the history and theory of the museum. Central to all his teaching is a direct engagement with material cultural. In 2018, he and his students organized the exhibition Into the White: The Art and Science of the Arctic at the University Museum, which brought together objects of art and science that were made or found in the Arctic Circle.  

Before coming to the University of Groningen he held positions at Columbia University and Yale University. He was a Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence.His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Kolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Young Academy Groningen. Keizer is a member of the Young Academy Groningen (https://www.rug.nl/research/young-academy/). He chairs the Master Program in Curatorial Studies, is the chair of the Program Committee of the Art History Department and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Dutch University Art Institute in Florence.

Publications:  

Books:    

Leonardo’s Paradox: Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and Reaktion, 2019).   

The Realism of Piero della Francesca (London: Routledge, 2017). 

Michelangelo and the Politics of Art (forthcoming).  

Co-edited with Thijs de Raedt, Artemisia. Vrouw & Macht, exh.cat. Rijksmuseum Twenthe (Zwolle: Waanders, 2021). 

Co-edited with Todd Richardson, The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011).  

Book General Public:     This Is Leonardo da Vinci, with the illustrator Christina Christoforou (London: Laurence King, 2016). With translations into Turkish and Japanese.   

Articles: 

"The Moment of Signing," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, forthcoming 2022. 

“Near Painting: Caravaggio, Beuys and Unformed Style,” 21-Inquiries 2.3 (2021): 77-114.

“De schilderkunst is vrouwelijk!,” in Artemisia: Vrouw en Macht, tent.cat. Rijksmuseum Twenthe (Zwolle: Waanders, 2021).

“Free Ground: The Structure of Drawing in the Dutch Republic,” in Zeichnen auf kolorierten Papieren in Süd und Nord von 1400 bis 1650, ed. Iris Brahms and Klaus Krüger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 173-93. 

“Rembrandt’s Nature: Paint and Pedagogy in the Dutch Republic,” Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art 68 (2018). 

“Leonardo’s Prophecy: Towards a Visual Culture of Dreaming in the Renaissance,” in Leonardo e gli altri, ed. Francesca Borgo, Rodolfo Maffeis, Alessandro Nova (Venice: Marsilio, 2019), 229-48. 

“The Truth of Sculpture,” Making and Unmaking Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Daniel M. Zoli, Amy Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).  

“Site-Specificity,” in Michelangelo: Scholarship for a New Millennium, ed. Tamara Smithers (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 25-46. 

“Albrecht Dürer, Drawing, and Allegory,” in The Aura of the Word in the Age of Print, ed. Jessica Buskirk and Samuel Mareel (London: Routledge, 2015), 130-50. 

“The Concept of Style in Early Renaissance Art,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78 (2015): 370-85. 

“Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Art History 38.1 (January 2015): 11-37. 

“Leonardo and Allegory,” Oxford Art Journal 35.3 (October 2012): 433-55. 

“Michelangelo, Drawing and the Subject of Art,” The Art Bulletin 93.3 (September 2011): 304-24. 

“Michelangelo Out of Focus: Medievalism as Absent Life in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production, ed. Alicia Montoya, Wim van Anrooij and Sophie van Romburgh (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), 391-425. 

“Giuliano Salviati, Michelangelo and the ‘David’,” The Burlington Magazine 150 (October 2008): 664-68.  

Book reviews: 

Review of Barbara Tramelli, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura: Color, Perspective and Anatomy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), History of Humanities 3.1 (2018): 223-25. 

Review of Michael Hirst, Michelangelo. A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), and Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), CAA Reviews (August 2013). 

Review of Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 71.1 (2008): 136-43.  

Newspaper and other publications: “Venetiaanse veelzijdigheid: De stijl van Bellini,” Kunstschrift (December 2018): 20-27. “‘De bladeren luisterrijk door het zonlicht dat op hen valt’: over de droom van een universele kunst,” Kunstschrift (April 2017): 8-11. Letter to the editor, The Art Bulletin 95.4 (2013), 657-58. “Pleidooi ter verdediging van de geesteswetenschappen [= To the defense of the humanities],” Volkskrant (April 4, 2012).
Last modified:02 September 2022 2.37 p.m.

Contact information

Oude Boteringestraat 34
9712 GK Groningen
The Netherlands
Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26
9712 EK Groningen
The Netherlands

History of Art + Architecture