Biology

• Ricardo De Mambro Santos
• Assistant Professor of Art History
• Art Building 206
• rdemambr@willamette.edu

Ricardo De Mambro Santos

Education

• B. A., M.A., Università di Roma “La Sapienza” (Italy)
• Ph.D., Università degli Studi di Bologna (Italy)
• Post-Doctoral, Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane – Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze (Italy)

Class Homepages

Western Art History II

Leonardo Da Vinci

Renaissance Art Treatises 

Research and Teaching

Professor De Mambro Santos is an expert in Italian and European Renaissance and Mannerism. He has taught for twelve years at the University of Rome courses on Renaissance art literature and visual culture. He has also taught classes on the activity of European painters in China and India from the sixteenth- to the eighteenth-century at the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Rome. More recently, as a Visiting Professor, he taught at the University of Washington and Whitman College classes on Northern Renaissance, Brazilian visual culture, and theories of contemporary art.

His major publications are dedicated to the analysis of European Renaissance treatises on art, with particular attention to the writings of Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander. Besides his wide-ranging expertise in European visual culture from the fifteenth- to the seventeenth-century, Professor De Mambro Santos has also undertaken several researches in complementary fields (including art theory, film studies, textual studies, and semiotics).

He has taken part in the organization of an important exhibit, Dove il Sì Suona, held in 2002 at the Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence, as the curator of the section entitled “The Fortune of Italian Art Literature”, which featured paintings, engravings and books from the Renaissance through the eighteenth-century. Given his interests in film studies, he has also produced documentaries for Italian television (RAI Educational) and curated several art exhibits, including two for the Museum of Rome and the University of Washington’s Felliniana celebration in 2003 (The Gladiator Nun: Fellini’s Women, at the Henry Art Gallery, an exhibit of original Fellini drawings; and The Beautiful Confusion. Fellini and Secchiaroli on the Set of 8 ½, an exhibit of photographs at Suzzallo Library). In 2005 he was once again the curator of an exhibit of Fellini’s drawings (Fellini – Erotomachia) at the Karikaturmuseum in Krems, Austria. In 2008 he produced a documentary on Leonardo da Vinci for the Japanese Network Television.

He has just finished a study on the influence of Karel van Mander’s art theory in the production and the reception of paintings, drawings and prints in Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth-century (Picturams Labyrinthus. Karel van Mander e la cultura artistica in Olanda tra Rinascimento e Manierismo). Currently he is writing two other books: a monograph on the activity of Leonardo da Vinci in Rome and his connections with the so-called Amadeits, and a study on the interplay of forgery, irony, and interpicturiality in Italian and Netherlandish Mannerism.

Selected Publications