Isabella Foglia, M.A.

I am currently a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Tristan Weddigen, working on a dissertation entitled Baroque Irony: Humor as a Painterly Strategy in the Counter-Reformation, which explores themes such as the grotesque, parody, and burlesque language in Italian post-Tridentine artistic production.

I completed my Master’s studies at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, graduating in 2022 with a first thesis on the gestural language of Lorenzo Lotto and a second thesis entitled La chair, la damnation et le salut. La représentation de la nudité dans le Jugement Dernier, dans l’art nordique entre XVe et XVIIe siècles, both supervised by Prof. Philippe Morel. After my studies, I undertook an internship at the Fondation Custodia in Paris, where I worked on the cataloguing of autograph letters by Italian artists from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries preserved in their collection, and where I began to develop my doctoral project.
My academic path began with a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Italian Linguistics at the University of Zurich, with a thesis entitled Piramo e Tisbe. Intreccio tra arte e letteratura italiana nel Cinquecento e nel Seicento (supervised by Prof. Joris van Gastel). During this time, I also contributed to the publication project of the exhibition catalogue Die Poesie der Linie. Italienische Meister Zeichnungen (Kunsthaus Zürich, 2020), under the guidance of Prof. Michael Matile.