Prof. S. Nethersole (Scott)

Scott Nethersole is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture from 500-1500 at Radboud University. His research focusses on the art and visual world of the fifteenth century, both in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy and in pre-colonial Africa, where he is particularly interested in the visual traces of first contact between Africans and Europeans.

He is currently engaged with four projects: a study of contact on the African continent from the perspective of art history; an exhibition about the years in which Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael all coincided in Florence (with Dr Per Rumberg); a monograph on the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti; and a new edition and translation of Ghiberti’s writings, the so-called Commentarii (with Dr Giulio Dalvit, Prof. Cecilia Panti and Prof. Nicholas Temple).

He is the author of 'Art and Violence in Early Renaissance Florence' (Yale University Press, 2018) and the 'Art of Renaissance Florence: A City and its Legacy' (Laurence King, 2019). In 2011, he co-curated Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 at the National Gallery in London. He is also the author of numerous articles, including recent contributions on the perception of skin colour in the fifteenth century and Khoekhoe reactions to Portuguese monuments on the South African coast in the late fifteenth century.

Before joining Radboud, he was Reader in Italian Renaissance Art, 1400-1500, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Between 2008-2010, he was the Harry M Weinrebe Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London. He was a Michael Bromberg Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in 2007; a Residential Fellow at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut te Florence in 2012; a Berenson Fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence in 2019, and a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in 2023.