Main Focus
- Early Modern art and architecture
- Reformation and Counter-Reformation
- Religious culture(s) of Christianity
- Art and anthropology, historical anthropology
- History of knowledge, antiquarianism, epistemic images
Research Project
Curriculum Vitae
Eelco Nagelsmit is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. His research focuses on the historical functions of art and architecture in their cultural, political and religious contexts, and is most concerned with the capacity of art to transform the beholder. He received his PhD from the universities of Ghent and Leiden with a dissertation on art and architecture as agents of change in Counter-Reformation Brussels (2014). He has held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Copenhagen (in the ERC-project “SOLITUDES: Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century”) and was scientific assisant at ETH Zurich, taught at the Universities of Groningen and Leiden, and is currently affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As laureate of an NWO Veni Grant he studied the exchange of gifts between early modern princes and theologians. His current research project focuses on the seventeenth-century use of citation of older works of art as “historical evidence”.