Una D'Elia
Professor and Graduate Chair
Department of Art History and Art Conservation
Research Interests
Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture, prints, and architecture, with a particular interest in the relationships between art and literature, the games people played in interpreting and misinterpreting images, and the ways in which images were an integral part of people鈥檚 lives.
Biography
Una Roman D'Elia is a specialist and has published on Italian Renaissance painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and architecture. Her first book, The Poetics of Titian's Religious Paintings, explores Titian's relationships with writers, and how the painter and his literary friends negotiated the shifting boundaries of decorum during an age of religious and social change. She has also published an award-winning article on Michelangelo, as well articles on art as evidence, debased imagery, artistic speed, literary descriptions of paintings, gigantic sculptures in villa gardens, playful grotesques, ritual performances, and the painted skin of Renaissance sculptures. Her most recent book, Raphael's Ostrich, examines the strange allegorical imagery of the sixteenth century, focusing on an improbable proliferation of images of ostriches. The book ranges from ancient Egypt to the end of the sixteenth century, exploring how by creating a naturalistic animal that evoked hidden knowledge -- a modern hieroglyph -- Raphael exposed the tensions around the issue of how the natural world is imbued with meaning, a question that came to a crisis with the rise of the foundations of both modern art history and natural history. Una D'Elia also edited a collection of essays on drawing in the Renaissance, in honour of her late colleague, Prof. David McTavish. She has been a fellow at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Villa I Tatti, and has won numerous grants and fellowships from such agencies as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Kress Foundation.
Una D'Elia's current research focuses on painted sculptures in Renaissance Italy. Examining such objects as crucifixes with moveable jointed limbs and tongues, reliefs of the Madonna with holes for adding jewelry, and reliquary busts, she explores the ways in which coloured sculptures were treated as if they were living, speaking people. This project will be the first to reveal how in the Renaissance painted sculpture was a pan-Italian vernacular, a common visual language created by artists and patrons who traveled in this cosmopolitan society. Regional variations, she demonstrates, are like the deliberate use of dialect in literature, an expression of local pride. Not na茂ve or parochial, as many tacitly assume, these sophisticated works of classically-inspired illusionism offer a more colourful and diverse Renaissance than the white marble statues enshrined by the western academic tradition as high art.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate Courses Taught
ARTH 120: Art in the West from Antiquity to Modernity
ARTH 215: Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance Art, 1500-1600
ARTH 214: Renaissance Art and Architecture before 1500
ARTH 213: Renaissance Art and Architecture
ARTH 345: Italian Art of the High Renaissance
ARTH 346: Sculpture, Gender, and the Body in the Italian Renaissance
ARTH 347: Mannerism
ARTH 482: Gothic Sculpture
ARTH 485: A Social and Material History of Italian Renaissance Sculpture
ARTH 486: Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice
Venice Summer School
Graduate Courses Taught
ARTH 840: Studies in Italian Renaissance Art I
ARTH 841: Studies in Italian Renaissance Art II
ARTH 842: Studies in Italian Renaissance Art III
Recent Publications
Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Tuscany, co-authored with Rachel Boyd (PhD Columbia University, 2020), Heather Merla (PhD Queen鈥檚 University, 2018), Bronwyn Bond (ABD, Queen鈥檚 University), and Claire Litt (PhD Queen鈥檚 University, 2022), first published in 2018 and continuously updated.
An open access repository of information about and high-resolution images of over 350 objects.
"The Color White in Fifteenth Century Tuscan Sculpture." In The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth Century Italy, ed. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli, 41-63. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
"How the Quattrocento Saw Ancient Sculpture in Color." Source: Notes in the History of Art 35, n. 3 (Spring 2016), 216-226.
Raphael's Ostrich. Penn State University Press, 2015.
Editor of Rethinking Renaissance Drawings: Essays in Honour of David McTavish. McGill 成人大片 Press, 2015.
"Grotesque Painting and Painting as Grotesque in the Renaissance." Source: Notes in the History of Art 33, n. 2 (Winter 2014): 5-12.
"Anatomizing Love, Vivisecting Cupid." In Essays in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Louis Waldman and Machtaelt Israels, 481-6. Harvard University Press, 2013.
"Giambologna's giant and the cinquecento villa garden as a landscape of suffering." Journal of the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 31 (2011): 1-25.
"What Allegories Wear in Sixteenth Century Italy." In Unfolding the Textile Medium in Early Modern Art and Literature, ed. Tristan Weddigen. Imorde, 2010.
The Poetics of Titian's Religious Paintings
Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Rome and Lazio, co-authored with Elizabeth Provost (MAC Queen鈥檚 University 2025), first published in 2025.
An open access repository of information about and high-resolution images of
over 200 objects.
Renaissance and Baroque Polychrome Sculpture in Naples and Campania, co-authored with Ariel Lacombe (PhD student, Queen鈥檚 University), first published in 2025.
An open access repository of information about and high-resolution images of over 130 objects.
Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Puglia and Basilicata, co-authored with Claire Litt (PhD Queen鈥檚 University, 2022), first published in 2021 and continuously updated
An open access repository of information about and high-resolution images of over 100 objects.
Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture in Lombardy and Piedmont, co-authored with Kennis Forte (PhD Queen鈥檚 2022), first published in 2021 and continuously updated
An open access repository of information about and high-resolution images of
over 180 sculptures and sculptural groups
鈥淧ainting on Sculptures in Fifteenth-century Florence: Case Studies.鈥 Scuplture Journal 34.1 (2025): 69-86.
鈥淭he Dead Weight of Christ: Deposition Cloths and the Mechanics of Performance in the Italian Renaissance.鈥 Source: Notes in the History of Art 44.1 (Fall 2024): 5-15.