Prof. Andrew Casper is a specialist of Renaissance and Baroque art of southern Europe, and particularly religious imagery in Italy in the late 1500s and 1600s. His recent research has examined the artistic conception of the Shroud of Turin, looking at how early-modern devotional manuals draw from contemporary art theory to portray the Shroud’s imprint of Christ’s body as a divine work of art. This has culminated in various published essays and a book titled An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Penn State University Press, 2021). He has previously researched the early career of Domenikos Theotokopoulos “El Greco” and religious art after the Counter Reformation in Italy. He is the author of numerous essays and articles on sixteenth-century icons and the religious paintings from El Greco’s Italian period. His book Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (Penn State University Press, 2014) uses El Greco’s early paintings to advance new ideas concerning the conception of religious imagery after the Council of Trent.
Prof. Casper’s current research examines the artistic, sacred, and scientific portrayal of Christ’s body in Italian devotional painting of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the cult of the miraculous icon of Santa Maria della Consolata in Turin. At Miami he teaches courses in Renaissance and Baroque art in Europe and Latin America. He was a 2012 finalist for the E. Phillips Knox Teaching Award, the university’s highest recognition for innovative teaching, and is the winner of the 2014 Miami University Distinguished Teaching Award.
