Scott Nethersole

Scott Nethersole is a specialist in the art of Renaissance Florence, athough his current research focusses on connections (and the lack of connections) between Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Europe in the fifteenth fentury.  He is particularly interested in the ‘Miracle of the Black Leg’ for how it reveals perceptions of Christian Africa in mid-fifteenth-century Florence.  He is also currently engaged with research on Lorenzo Ghiberti, which will have two outcomes: a monograph due in 2022/3 and a new edition, translation and commentary of Ghiberti’s writings on art (I commentarii), produced in collaboration with Dr Guilio Dalvit, Prof. Cecilia Panti (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) and Prof. Nicholas Temple (School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University).  Finally, he is preparing an exhibition focused on Botticelli’s Trinity Altarpiece together with colleagues in the Courtauld Gallery.

Scott read History of Art as a BA and MA student at The Courtauld, where he specialised in Florentine Renaissance art. After four years working for the English furniture department at Sotheby’s, he returned to The Courtauld to take his PhD, writing his thesis on ‘The Representation of Violence in Fifteenth-century Florence’. While writing his doctorate he held the Michael Bromberg Fellowship in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. From 2008 to 2010, he was the Harry M Weinrebe Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London, before returning to The Courtauld to take up the post of Lecturer in Italian Renaissance Art in September 2010. Scott curated the exhibition Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 at the National Gallery in summer 2011.

Until recently, Scott’s research has focused on fifteenth-century Florence, although his teaching embraces much more of central Italy, especially Siena and Perugia. He spent many years studying the relationship between art and violence in Florentine art of the fifteenth century, which resulted in a book, Art and Violence in Early Renaissance Florence, that appeared with Yale University Press in June 2018. It was followed by Art of Renaissance Florence: A City and its Legacy in January 2019. He is also interested in the reception of Renaissance art, especially in the seventeenth century, by artists such as Sassoferrato and Carlo Dolci.

• Central Italian, especially Florentine, Art of the Fifteenth Century
• Violence in Art
• Lorenzo Ghiberti
• Perceptions of Africa in the art of Southern Europe

• I am currently teaching on both the BA and MA programmes

Current

• Matteo Chirumbolo, 'Reframing the Patronage of Girolamo Basso and Domenico della Rovere between Rome, Loreto and Turin'
• Samuel Dawson, ‘Unum Corpus: A Study of the Olivetan Order and their Artistic Patronage’
• Emily Markham, 'Controlling Space, Image and Memory: A Study of Political Exile in Bologna and Florence (1445 to 1515)'
• Alexander Noelle, ‘The Myth and Manipulation of Giuliano de’ Medici’
• Eowyn Kerr-Di Carlo (co-supervised with Joanna Cannon), ‘Lorenzo Monaco and the Missal of Cardinal Acciaiuoli: Patronage, Production and the Painter-illuminators of Early Renaissance Florence’
• Irma Passeri (co-supervised with Prof. Aviva Burnstock), ‘An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study and Understanding of Damages in Works of Art’ 

Recently completed

• (2015) Mary Camp (co-supervised with Prof. Paul Hills), ‘”Superare la natura”: The Portraits of Jacopo Pontormo’
• (2017) Joost Joustra, ‘Pictorial Space and Sacred Subject Matter in Florentine Painting 1425-1466’
• (2017) Laura Llewellyn, ‘Art, Community and Religious Women in the Oltrarno, Florene: The Early Visual Culture of the Convents of Santa Monaca, Santa Chiara and the Annalena'
• (2019) Peter Crack (co-supervised with Susanna Avery-Quash), 'Justifying the ‘Italian Primitives’: Public Acquisitions in Twentieth-Century Britain'
• (2019) Bryony Bartlett-Rawlings (co-supervised with Guido Rebecchini), ‘Nicoletto da Modena and the Centres of Early Italian Print Production, 1490-1530’
• (2020) Alexander Rostel, ‘Florentine Patronage Networks during the 1490s: The Corbinelli and Gondi Altarpieces’
• (2020) Giulio Dalvit, 'Rethinking Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta'
•