Jodi Cranston

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Professor Jodi Cranston received her B.A. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University and her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She is the author of three books, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2000); The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Facture in Titian’s Later Paintings (Penn State University Press, 2010); and Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (Penn State University Press, 2019); editor and contributor to Venetian Painting Matters, 1450-1750 (Brepols, 2015); and has contributed several articles to interdisciplinary Renaissance publications. She was the recipient of a Charles Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2004-5), of a Renaissance Society of America Research Grant (2015), and of the Jeffrey Henderson Senior Fellowship from the BU Center for the Humanities (2013-4). She recently launched two digital mapping projects, one, Mapping Titian, which visualizes the provenance of Titian’s pictures from the 16th century to the present day and another, Mapping Paintings, which allows users to map any artwork. She received a Digital Art History Grant from the Kress Foundation to develop both applications.

She is currently completing a book project, “Animal Sightings: Art, Animals, and European Court Culture, 1400-1550,” which is under contract with Penn State University Press (2025). The book considers the following questions: How do the experiences of representing, viewing, and using nonhuman animals and animal products in artworks make the categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ meaningful in the Renaissance?; How is the act of observation of the natural world defined, theorized, and visualized in the 15th and 16th centuries in Northern Italy, Austria, and Southern Germany?

Curriculum Vitae

Select Publications

	The Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice. Penn State University Press, 2019 Recipient of the 2021 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Book Prize … read more
	“Mapping Paintings, or How to Breathe Life into Provenance.” commissioned book chapter for The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, edited by Kathryn Brown. London: Routledge, 2020.
	“The Hidden Signatures of Titian.” Word & Image 34:4 (Oct-Dec, 2018): 372-87.