François Quiviger
Associate Fellow
François Quiviger was born in France and educated in Canada where he received a B.A. and M.A. in Art History from the University of Montréal. He joined the Warburg Institute in 1983 where he completed a PhD in Combined Historical Studies. Since 1987 he has worked at the Institute as a librarian, webmaster, researcher and teacher, and from 2010 as curator of digital resources.
Profile
He has taught yearly seminars on the Survival of Classical art, Renaissance academies, art theories, early modern art, decorative arts and material culture for the Warburg Institute's MA course, the V&A - RCA MA in the History of Design and the UCL MA in Reception of the Classical World.
From 2002 to 2016 he has developed and raised funds for the Institute's digitisation program to build a free online electronic library of out-of-print sources. These include collections of early printed texts on, among others, early modern academies, art theory, Arabic astrology, the works of Giordano Bruno, Renaissance festivals, early opera libretti as well as 10000 images of early illustrated books available on the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database and on Artstor. A summary of the digital work completed during these years can be consulted here.
Since October 2016 he is an Associate Fellow of the Warburg Institute as well as general editor of the Renaissance Lives series for Reaktion Books.
Research
The main theme of his research is the history of cognition and sensation in so far as it pertains to the making and reception of images and to the relationship of humans to nature. With these questions in mind he has written on early modern art and art theories, academies, music, wine and banqueting. Recent books include The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (2010) and Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature (2019). He is currently working on the French installation artist and naturalist Bernard Palissy.