Michael Cole is Howard McP. Davis Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, he is the author of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (Yale, 2015) and Sofonisba's Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work (Princeton, 2019), among other books. He became interested in the topic that grew into the Connecting Art Histories project when working with Rebecca Zorach on The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2009), a co-edited volume that sought to move beyond the association of idolatry with image destruction and to ask the more art historical question of how concepts of idolatry mattered for image making in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere.
