Rebekah Compton

Lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Italian Renaissance Art
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2009

Contact Information

Email:
Office: 653A Schermerhorn Hall
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 1-3

Biography

Rebekah Compton received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, in May of 2009. She is an Early Modernist with a specialization in Italian Renaissance Art, 1400-1600. Her research investigates the portrayal of desire in early modern visual culture. Rebekah's current book project, titled Venus: Beauty, Love, and Sex in Renaissance Florence, examines Venus in relation to the amorous, aesthetic, procreative, and concupiscent desires of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Florentines. The study offers a comprehensive account of the development and transformation of Venus’s iconography in relation to social, political, cultural, and scientific changes within Florence over a two-hundred-year period.

Inspired by recent research on Venusian magic and aphrodisiacs, Rebekah's next project, Magic and the Miraculous in the Renaissance, will examine the collision and differentiation between magic and the miraculous in the visual and material culture of early modern Italy. For the past two years, Rebekah has held the position of lecturer in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where she has taught courses on Gender in Italian Renaissance Art, Renaissance Art in Rome, 1400-1600, and Theories and Methods of Art History.

Publications

Rebekah Compton, "Omnia Vincit Amor: The Sovereignty of Love in Michelangelo's Venus and Cupid," Mediaevalia 31 (2012).