Caitlin DiMartino

Caitin Irene DiMartino is a specialist in late medieval and early modern art. Her research broadly addresses the relationship between devotional imagery, materiality, and shifting ideas of race and gender in Western Europe and Latin America before 1700. She is particularly interested in early modern concerns with the transmutation of matter and its relationship to the perceived permanence or impermanence of bodily states. Her first book project, Resplendent Darkness: Black Madonnas and the Materiality of Race in Early Modern Europe investigates the periodization of premodern race and blackness through the phenomenon of “Black Madonnas” in Spain, France, and Italy between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Drawing from recent work in Premodern Critical Race Studies and Black Feminist Theory, the book argues that Marian blackness—as a concept, color, and material—served as an extended metaphor for racialized desire and religious transformation, in each instance illustrating the perceived spiritual and material value of black skin in the cohesion and elevation of the white, Christian body politic.

In her teaching, Professor DiMartino seeks to broaden the geographical, material, and thematic perspectives of Renaissance and Baroque art, inviting students to explore the artistic developments of early modern Europe as contingent on intercultural contact and exchange with Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her courses cover such topics as premodern race (Art and Race from the Crusades to Colonization), artistic identity in colonial Latin America (Unmaking Empire), and the so-called “global turn” in early modern art through the frameworks of environment, geography, and empire (Liquid Visions: Art of the Early Modern Ocean; Making Space in a Transatlantic World, 1500-1700) the circulation and symbolism of materials (Materializing the Self and Other), and shifting definitions of idolatry or iconoclasm from a trans-cultural perspective (Making and Breaking Sacred Images).

Professor DiMartino holds a PhD in Art History from Northwestern University and an MA from the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a teaching assistant in a bilingual elementary school in Collado Villalba, Spain.