Associate Professor
Chriscinda Henry’s research focuses on the role of the arts in social life and intellectual culture in Renaissance Europe. Her book Playful Pictures: Art, Leisure, and Entertainment in the Venetian Renaissance Home (Penn State University Press, 2022), draws connections between the visual arts, literature, music, and theater in late fifteenth and sixteenth-century domestic life. She also recently co-edited the volume Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy with musicologist Tim Shephard (Routledge, forthcoming). Current projects include articles on the Renaissance studiolo as an ecology of self-care and the origins and early history of the Venetian music study.
Selected publications:
"Courtesans as Collectors and Tastemakers in Renaissance Italy," in When Michelangelo Was Modern: Collecting, Patronage and the Art Market in Italy, 1450-1650, ed. Inge Reist (Brill, 2022), pp. 76–97.
Playful Pictures: Art, Leisure, and Entertainment in the Venetian Renaissance Home (Penn State University Press, 2022).
“Navigating the Palace Underworld: Recreational Space, Pleasure, and Release at the Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trent.” In Early Modern Spaces in Motion: Design, Experience and Rhetoric, ed. Kimberley Skelton, pp. 33-57. 
Amsterdam and New York: University of Amsterdam Press, 2020.
“From Beggar to Virtuoso: The Street Singer in the Netherlandish Visual Tradition, 1500–1600,” Renaissance Studies 33/1 (January, 2019): 136-58.
“Leonardo da Vinci, Parody, and Pictorial Magic.” In Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games, ed. Allison Levy, pp. 73-96. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017.
“Alter Orpheus: Masks of Virtuosity in Renaissance Portraits of Musical Improvisers,” Italian Studies 71/2 (2016): 238-58.
“What Makes a Picture? Evidence from Sixteenth-Century Venetian Property Inventories,” Journal of the History of Collections 23/2 (2011): 253-65.