Nethersole is a specialist in the art of fifteenth-century Florence. For many years, a major theme of his research was the relationship between art and violence in Florence art, which resulted in a book with Yale University Press: Art and Violence in Early Renaissance Florence. More recently, he has been working on the sculptor and writer Lorenzo Ghiberti, and on the perception of skin colour in late Medieval Europe.
His current research projects look at connections between sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe in the fifteenth century, which he will develop at Radboud University. ‘I am looking forward to developing projects that look at the artistic and visual points of contact between Europe and Africa in the late Middle Ages,’ Nethersole says. ‘In this project I will work on a period long before colonialization, when various different cultures on both continents interacted in ways that can sometimes be surprising to us in the twenty-first century.’
About Scott Nethersole
Nethersole (Durban, South Africa, 1977) obtained his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2009. For his PhD he examined the representation of violence in Fifteenth-Century Florence. He was a curatorial assistant at the National Gallery in London from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, he was appointed as a lecturer in Italian Renaissance Art, 1400-1500 at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has also been a fellow at I Tatti (Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies) and at STIAS (the Stellensbosch Institute for Advanced Study).