Elected as a professor at the Collège de France in 2026, Diane Bodart holds the chair in the History of the Arts in Early Modern Europe.
Born in Rome, Italy, in 1970, she studied art history at La Sapienza University (1994). Based on her thesis, she published the book Tiziano e Federico II Gonzaga (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998). She went on to earn a DEA and then a Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, under the supervision of Daniel Arasse, and defended her dissertation in 2003, which was published under the title Pouvoirs du portrait sous les Habsbourg d’Espagne (Paris, INHA, 2011; winner of the Académie Française’s Eugène Carrière Prize). She was a resident at the Villa Medici – Académie de France in Rome and received fellowships from the German Center for Art History in Paris, the Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute.
A lecturer in Renaissance art history at the University of Poitiers from 2004 to 2013, she was appointed professor of early modern art history at Columbia University in 2013, then tenured professor of the “History of Italian Renaissance Art – David Rosand” in 2016. She received tenure (habilitation) at that institution in 2019. As scientific director of Casa Muraro—Columbia University’s new research and teaching center in Venice—from 2023 to 2025, she continues her involvement in this project as a member of the executive committee.
Her research initially focused on the representation of power and the relationship between art and politics in Italy and in the Spanish Habsburg Empire during the early modern period. This broad geographical framework allows her to examine the creation of artworks as well as their production in light of artistic theories and image-making practices within cultural contexts that are both distinct and interconnected. Combining an analysis of representation with a study of the materiality of artworks, her work also explores how these material properties—and the experiments they inspire—contribute to artistic invention and its impact.
