Joost Keizer

Joost Keizer is Vice Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Associate Professor in Art History.

His research investigates the geographical and temporal divisions of late medieval and early modern European art. That means that he wants to know how artists in Europe thought about the history of art and how they situated that history in relation to regions and places outside of Europe. Central to all of his work is art’s relationship to nature.

Keizer has published articles on the growing historical consciousness of European artists, the relationship between art-making and natural processes of creation, and early definition of style in journals such as The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Journal, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. He is the author of The Realism of Piero della Francesca (Routledge 2017, paperback 2019) and Leonardo’s Paradox: Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Together with the illustrator Christina Christoforou he published an illustrated book on Leonardo da Vinci for young adolescents. He is currently finishing a book on the concepts of history and nature in Dutch seventeenth-century landscapes and embarking on a new project on air in late medieval Italian art (1250 – 1450).

In 2021-22, Keizer curated the exhibition Artemisia. Vrouw en Macht (Artemisia. Woman and Power) on the seventeenth-century Italian woman painter Artemisia Gentileschi at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe.

Keizer received his Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Groningen (2003) and his PhD from Leiden University (2008). He was Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and Assistant Professor at Yale University. His research has been supported by fellowships from Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), the BildEvidenz Seminar at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Young Academy Groningen.