Michael Cole is Professor and Department Chair of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, his recent books include Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (Princeton, 2011), Italian Renaissance Art (co-authored with Stephen Campbell, Thames & Hudson, 2011, second edition underway) and Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (Yale, 2015). 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. Currently he is writing a monograph on the painter Sofonisba Anguissola, whose career took her from Spanish Lombardy to Spain to the Viceroyalty of Sicily.
