Blake De Luca

M.A./Ph.D. Student

bdeluca@berkeley.edu

  • 6314 Dwinelle
  • Fall 2023: MTh 11-12 & by appt

Blake De Luca (2022) is a PhD student in the Department of Italian Studies.

His research stems from a lifelong interest in time as an abstract entity and philosophical concept and in its relation to spatiality. It explores the development in the awareness and conceptualization of both throughout the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods in Italy (1300-1600).

Before joining the Department of Italian Studies at Berkeley, Blake received both their BA in Art History (summa cum laude) and their MA in Art History (summa cum laude) from Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. His undergraduate thesis proposed a theoretical framework for the relation between painted space and real space in fifteenth-century Italian altarpieces, while his Master’s thesis dealt with some of the iconographical derivations from the Mantegna Tarot, bringing him to study three painting cycles in Central Italy and to dive through XVI century archives.

Blake has worked at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, acting as a guide and project coordinator in Palazzo Barberini, and held a scholarship from the Giulio Carlo Argan library of Art History in Sapienza University, Rome. They also gained international experience by winning an Erasmus+ grant, which allowed them to spend a semester in Paris, at Sorbonne University.

Other interests include feminism and queer theory, challenging the erasure of women and queer people through the Renaissance and tracing iconographic and literary models back to their origins.