On December 5, 2025, the Florence Graduate Program in Italian Renaissance Art hosted its 39th Annual Symposium, welcoming a virtually standing-room-only audience to Villa Rossa’s Room 13 to hear the largest M.A. cohort in the program’s history present their capstone research. The event highlighted not only the caliber of student work, but also the program’s defining strength: Florence is not a setting for study; it is the site of study.
As one of the College of Arts and Sciences’ signature programs, the Florence Program offers an M.A. in Art History through an immersive experience in Italy that is difficult to replicate anywhere else. Students don’t learn about the Renaissance at a distance; they study it where it was made, with direct access to artworks, architecture, and the documentary and conservation infrastructures that sustain the field. Working in and beyond Florence, candidates develop the practices of professional art historians—close looking, archival research, and persuasive public presentation—while engaging a community of recognized scholars, conservators, curators, and research institutes.
That is why the experience is so transformative. Supported by a rigorous curriculum and close mentorship, students graduate with the skills to pursue a wide range of careers, producing original research that makes substantive contributions to Renaissance studies.
This year’s symposium also underscored the program’s continuity across generations with the visit of Professor Eric Frank and Penni Montalbano (both alumni, 1976). Frank, a longtime art history professor at Occidental College, had the opportunity to reconnect with Oxy alumni including Jennifer Cowden and Sean Nelson, who now teaches the program’s graduate seminar “Mapping a Global Renaissance.”
With capstone presentations ranging from women’s art-historical biography and Medici-era politics to diplomatic ritual and devotional imagery, the symposium made clear why the Florence Program endures: it reshapes how students look, how they research, and how they speak as scholars. The symposium is the public culmination of that transformation—proof that the Renaissance holds “always more to say,” and that Florence remains one of the best places in the world to learn how to say it.
By Martina Daniele