Christopher Pastore is an Associate Director of Humanities and Social Sciences Programs and Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from Penn in 2003 and is currently revising a manuscript on sixteenth-century Italian villa culture and the aesthetics of Renaissance garden art titled Cultivating Antiquity that discusses the relationship between Italian villas and contemporary and historical Mediterranean examples.

His other current projects include a re-characterization of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina as republican propaganda promoting Florentine independence, a study of early modern personifications of America and the importance of gender in the encounter between the old and new worlds, and a consideration of the power of religious vision in the works of Piero della Francesca. His courses include: Improving Nature? a study of Renaissance and Baroque gardens and landscape architecture; Building the Myth of Venice, which studied the self-conscious behavior of artists and patrons in the early modern republic; Art and Gender in the Italian Renaissance; and Art in the Time of Michelangelo.

He is also working on Gathering Nuts, a children’s book about life in a suburban back yard, viewed through the eyes of the animals that visit his garden to eat his vegetables. His daughters, ages 6 and 8, have given the first two chapters rave reviews.