The Founding College of the University of Toronto
Philip Sohm, smiling at the camera, wearing a blue shirt.

Philip Sohm

Faculty
PhD
University Professor, Department of Art History
416-978-8105
UC 245
University College, 15 King's College Circle, Toronto, ON M5S 3H7
Campus: St. George

My past research covers a range of topics: social history and architectural design; the language of art theory and criticism; psycho-biographies of artists; non-verbal communication in painting; the biological and psychological conditions of artistic creativity and production; and the economic preconditions of making and marketing paintings. I am currently working on painters’ palettes and painting as performance.

Education

  • PhD, Johns Hopkins University

Research Interests 

  • Medieval
  • Early Modern
  • European
  • Early modern Italian art and architecture

Publications

  • “Giving Vasari the Giorgio Treatment,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 18, 2015, pp. 61–111.
  • Painting for Profit. The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-century Italian Painters, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010; co-author: Richard Spear.
  • The Artist Grows Old. The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500-1800, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2001.
  • Pittoresco. Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.