People  •  Art + Design, Architecture  •  Professor

Cammy Brothers

Professor Cammy Brothers specializes in Italian Renaissance, Mediterranean, and Spanish art and architecture. She joined Northeastern in 2016 from the University of Virginia, where she held the Valmarana Chair and was Director of the Venice Program. In recent years, she has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University (2018), a Guest Professor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) in Zurich (2021), and a Guest Professor at TU Wien, the architecture school in Vienna (2024).

She is the author of two monographs, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture (Yale University Press, 2008) and Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome (Princeton University Press, 2022) and the co-author (with Michael Waters) of Variety, Archeology and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice (UVA Art Museum, 2011), an exhibition she co-curated at the University of Virginia Museum of Art. In addition to her scholarly publications, she is a frequent contributor of art and book reviews to the Wall Street Journal, with over fifty contributions.

Her first book, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (Yale University Press, 2008) was the recipient of the Morey Prize from the College Art Association and the Hitchcock Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians and received twelve book reviews. Her second book, Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome (Princeton University Press, 2022) was recognized by the Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award and has received ten book reviews.

She has launched, with Professor Kathleen Christian of Humboldt University, Berlin, a new book series for Harvey Miller Press, “All Antica: Early Modern Perspectives on the Antique.” She also serves on the editorial board of the series “Buildings, Landscapes and Societies” for Penn State Press; Annali di architettura (associated with the Palladio Museum, Vicenza); Opus Incertum, an Italian architectural history journal; Cuadernos de la Alhambra, the scholarly journal of the Alhambra, Granada, and of TEMPORANEA Revista de Historia de la Arquitectura, a Seville based Spanish architectural history journal.

She has recently co-organized two major international conferences, on “Creativity and Invention in Antiquarian Drawings (1400–1600),” held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in September, 2024, and the basis of a book she is co-editing with Kathleen Christian; and “Architecture, Spaces, Freedom: Architecture and the Female Universe in the Renaissance,” to be held at the Palladio Museum in May, 2025, the proceeds of which she will co-edit into a volume of Annali di Architettura.

Research/Publications Highlights

Books

Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome, Princeton University Press, 2022

Variety, Archeology and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice (exhibition catalogue, co-edited with Michael Waters), University of Virginia Museum of Art, 2011

Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture, Yale University Press, 2009

Peer reviewed articles

2021 “Architecture and Interiors” in The Cultural History of Colour: The Renaissance, ed. Sven Dupre and Amy Buono, Bloomsbury, pp. 167-185

2017 “What Drawings Did in Renaissance Italy,” in The Companion to Early Modern Architecture, ed. Alina Payne, Blackwell Press, pp. 104-135

2015 “Un humanista italiano en Sevilla: Ciudades, Arquitectura y Paisaje,” in Los Jardines del Real Alcázar de Sevilla. Historia y Arquitectura desde el Medievo is- lámico al siglo XX, eds. Ana Marín Fidalgo and Carlos Plaza, Seville, pp. 84-101

2012 “Designing What You Cannot Draw: Michelangelo and the Laurentian Li- brary,”in Michelangelo und die Sprache der Architekturzeichnung/Michelangelo e il linguaggio del disegno di architettura, ed. Alessandro Nova and Golo Mau- rer, pp. 153-68

2011 “The Laurentian Library: Affect, Music, and Architecture,” in Das Auge der Ar- chitektur. Zur Frage der Bildlichkeit in der Baukunst, eds. Matteo Burioni, Jo- hannes Grave and Andreas Beyer, Munich, pp. 321-52

2010 “Drawing in the Void:The Space between the Sketchbook and the Treatise,” in Some Degree of Happiness. Festschrift for Howard Burns, edited by Maria Beltramini and Caroline Elam, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 93-105, pp. 667-683
“Michelangelo, Architecture, and the Stingray,” in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, eds. Lorenzo Pericolo and Alexander Nagel, Ashgate, pp. 159-178

2006 “Figura e Architettura nei Disegni di Michelangelo” in Michelangelo: Disegni di architettura, ed. Caroline Elam, catalogue and exhibition, Centro Inter- nazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Vicenza and Fondazione Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Marsilio), pp. 81-94

2002 “Reconstruction as Design: Giuliano da Sangallo and the ‘Palazo di Mecenate’ on the Quirinal Hill”, Annali di architettura 14: 55-7

2000 “Architecture, History, Archeology: Drawing Ancient Rome in the Letter to Leo X and in Sixteenth-Century Practice,” in Coming About…A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars Jones and Louisa Matthew, Harvard University Art Museums, pp. 135-40

“Architecture,Texts, and Imitation in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth- Century Rome,” Architecture and Language, ed. Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossly, Cambridge University Press, pp. 82-101

1994 “The Renaissance Reception of the Alhambra: The Letters of Andrea Nav-agero and the Palace of Charles V,” Muqarnas, vol. 11: 79-102

Recent criticism, art and books (all in the Wall Street Journal)

‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ Review: Splendor in Sketches, Feb. 3, 2025

‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504’ Review: Competition Among Masters, Dec. 25, 2024

”Siena, the Rise of Painting, 1300-1350: Intimate yet Monumental at the Met,” October 16

Book review of The Language of Architectural Classicism by Edward McParland, August 30

”Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Ursula: The Decisive Moment,” July 12

Book review of ”‘How to Be a Renaissance Woman’ Review: Bold and Beautiful” June 28

Book review of Shakespeare’s Sisters’ Review: Uncovering Brilliance, June 28

”Drawings of a Seasoned Master,” Review of ”Michelangelo: The Last Decades,” at the British Museum, June 13

Book review of Saving Michelangelo’s Dome by Wayne Kalayjian, March 15

”An Overlooked Florentine No Longer,” Review of Pesellino, A Master Revealed, National Gallery of Art, London, January 20

Departments

Art + Design, Architecture

Education

  • Ph.D, Harvard University, 1999
  • M.A., Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 1992
  • A.B., Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, 1991

Awards

  • Clark Fellowship,(Clark Institute of Art, Williamstown, MA), 2025
  • Senior Fellow, Collegium Helveticum, ETH, Zurich, 2021
  • Millard Meiss Publication Grant, College Art Association (for Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome), 2020
  • Humanities Fellowship from the Italian Academy Institute for Advanced Study, 2015
  • CASVA Senior Fellowship, Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, 2011
  • Charles Rufus Morey Award, for “an especially distinguished book in the history of art,” College Art Association, 2010
  • Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians, for “the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar”, 2010
  • Graham Foundation Award, 2008
  • Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Fellow, 2006-07
  • Canadian Centre for Architecture Fellowship, Montreal, 2006
  • Villa I Tatti Fellow, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, 2001-2
  • Rome Prize Fellow, American Academy in Rome, 1996-97