Vanessa A. Portugal is a Lecturer in Early Modern European Art History at the University of Lincoln. Her research focuses on art theory, and the alchemical, magical, and astrological uses of the image in the Early Modern world. Relevant topics of interest for her research include the history of science and medicine.
Her book Imagenes astrológicas en la Nueva España (UCO-Press 2018) explores the power of the astrological image from its artistic, political, meditative, divinatory, medical, and magical use in New Spain from the 16th to the 18th century.
Dr. Portugal´s publications explore a decolonial reception and interpretation of Graeco-Roman visual culture in Colonial Latin American contexts. She is co-editor of the book Aby Warburg (en/sobre) América: historia, sobrevivencias y repercusiones (forthcoming).
She is currently working on her second book on the cosmological artistic program of the seventeenth-century Monastery of the order of Saint Augustine in Morelia, México.
Dr. Portugal studied History and received her PhD in Art Historian by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Vanessa has carried out research stays at the Warburg Institute, the Pierpont-Morgan Library and Museum, the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, the Kunsthistorisches Institute Max-Planck, and the Plantin-Moretus Library. She is associate researcher at the project “Aby Warburg y los estudios precolombinos: reconstrucción historiográfica y desarrollo teórico” based at UNAM.
