Francesco Freddolini is Associate Professor, Art History, Luther College.  His areas of scholarly expertise include material and economic histories of sculpture, collecting and display, as well as early modern global artistic exchanges.  His publications include:  Giovanni Baratta, 1670–1747. Scultura e Industria del Marmo tra la Toscana e le Corti d’Europa (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013), contributions to Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550–1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), and the special section of the Journal of Art Historiography (2014) entitled “Inventories and Catalogues: Materials and Narrative Histories,” guest edited with Anne Helmreich.  He is currently co-editing with Marco Musillo a volume entitled The Medici, the Seas, the World: Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany. His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Imagining the Exotic Ruler in Early Modern Europe considers early modern European portraits of non-European rulers.  Often ethnographically incorrect, portraits of non-European Rulers made in early modern Europe frequently situated the sitters within implausible narratives. By switching the focus from the ethnographical errors to the motives, the production, and the reception of such imaginative narratives, this project investigates how these portraits framed and invented otherness for the European public, and in turn, revealed the artists’ and viewers’ identities.