Théo de Luca

Théo de Luca is an art historian specializing in early modern European painting, its ancient sources, and its afterlives. He recently completed his Ph.D. in the History of Art at Yale University, where his dissertation, Nicolas Poussin’s Chronotopes, proposes a chronotopic history of painting. Reworking Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope for the study of art, his project asks how painting gives time visible form by bringing distinct temporalities into relation within a single pictorial field. Through studies of Nicolas Poussin’s victories of Joshua, the Chantelou Seven Sacraments, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, and J. M. W. Turner’s Regulus, it argues that painting does not simply depict the past but makes historical worlds intelligible in the present.

Educated in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Théo received a B.A. in History of Art and Archaeology with a minor in Aesthetics from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, after completing his classes préparatoires at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux, his hometown. He went on to earn a Master 1 in Arts, Literature, and Languages from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and an M.A. in the History of Art with Distinction from University College London.

At Yale, Théo was twice awarded the Berthe Corr and James Corr Memorial Fellowship for academic excellence and served as a Graduate Fellow at the European Studies Council, MacMillan Center. In 2023, with support from the Max Kade Foundation, he pursued dissertation research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich while continuing his study of German at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. That same year, he was the Daniel Arasse Fellow at the École française de Rome and the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici.

Before coming to Yale, Théo’s first book was published by Walther König in Cologne and launched at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. A New Spirit in Painting, 1981: On Being an Antimodern reassesses the landmark exhibition through a critical essay and thematic interviews with key figures including Georg Baselitz, Sir Norman Rosenthal, and Sir Nicholas Serota.

Alongside his work on early modern painting and on the artistic cultures of ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque Rome, Paris, Italy, and France, Théo maintains an active dialogue with modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in how painters engage the art-historical past. His writings and interviews have appeared in publications on American and European artists including Georg Baselitz, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Claire Tabouret. Most recently, he contributed a full-length essay to the catalogue published by Thames & Hudson with the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for the museum’s 2025 David Hockney exhibition.