Joost Keizer received his MA. from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in 2003, and his Ph.D. from the Universiteit Leiden in 2008. Before coming to Yale, he was Mellon Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, 2008-2010.

His research focuses on Italian Renaissance art, from 1300 to 1550. He is interested in art and politics, the problem of allegory, Renaissance theories of artistic authorship, and the moment of 1500.

He just completed his first book, Michelangelo and the Politics of History, which studies Michelangelo's response to political change in the city of Florence during the last decade of the fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth century. He is currently working on a book on allegory in art around 1500; a book on systematicity, mimesis and authorship in fifteenth-century art; and essays on Piero della Francesca, death in Renaissance portraiture, and the destination of Renaissance artworks.

Selected Publications
“Leonardo and Allegory,” Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming).

“Michelangelo, Drawing and the Subject of Art,” The Art Bulletin 93 (September 2011): 304-24.

With Todd M. Richardson, “Introduction: The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts,” in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson, Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011, 1-23.

The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. Joost Keizer and Todd M. Richardson, Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011.

“Michelangelo Out of Focus: Medievalism as Absent Life in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Early Modern Medievalisms: The Interplay between Scholarly Reflection and Artistic Production, ed. Alicia Montoya, Wim van Anrooij and Sophie van Romburgh, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010, 391-425.

“Giuliano Salviati, Michelangelo and the ‘David’,” The Burlington Magazine 150 (October 2008): 664-68.