Ariella Minden is a specialist in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian art. Her research uses media theory as a lens through which to explore the emergence of new artistic technologies. Having studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art (M.A. 2016) and the University of Toronto (B.A. 2015, Ph.D. 2024), Minden currently serves as wissenschaftliche Assistentin to Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, where she was previously a predoctoral fellow in Dr. Sietske Fransen’s research group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions”. Prior to her arrival at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in 2022, Minden held a predoctoral fellowship in Prof. Dr. Alessandro Nova’s department at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut from 2018 to 2022.

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Ariella Minden about her thesis “In Dialogue: Medial Thinking in Bolognese Printmaking, 1500-1530”, which was awarded with the Wolfgang Ratjen Award 2025:

This dissertation presents a history of printmaking in Bologna between 1500 and 1530 by tracking the expansive network of intermedial relationships integral to defining new print media. As a nexus of trade, university centre, and the second city of the Papal States, Bologna offered an environment conducive to ambitious programs of print production characterized by a heightened medial consciousness on the part of printmakers and their patrons. The city gave rise and played host to some of the most important printmakers of the first three decades of the sixteenth century, including Marcantonio Raimondi (1480-1534), Ugo da Carpi (ca. 1503-ca. 1532), and Francesco Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-40), as well as the now unknown woodcutters who produced groundbreaking woodcut anatomical illustrations for the medical texts by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1460-1530). Each chapter of this dissertation examines how those involved in making prints established engraving, woodcut illustration, etching, and chiaroscuro woodcut next to metalwork, sculpture, manuscript illumination, painting, and drawing to define these emerging media. The medial entanglements interrogated in this dissertation are evident in the highly self-reflexive prints under discussion and are analyzed alongside a range of contemporary written sources including poetry, patents, dissection manuals, and art theoretical treatises. In focusing on Bologna, this dissertation shows how these four print media were being developed and defined not in isolation but next to one another in order to offer a reassessment of some of the most significant technological and artistic innovations of the early modern period. 

[Caption: Parmigianino and Ugo da Carpi, Diogenes, chiaroscuro woodcut from four blocks, ca. 1527-30, Zürich, Graphische Sammlung ETH.]