Rate My Professor Caitlin DiMartino

A specialist in late medieval and early modern art, DiMartino’s research broadly addresses the interplay between devotional imagery, materiality, and shifting notions of race and gender in Western Europe and Latin America before 1700. She is particularly interested in early modern ideas about the transmutation of matter and its connections to the perceived permanence or impermanence of bodily states. Her first book project, Resplendent Darkness: Black Madonnas and the Materiality of Race in Early Modern Europe, examines the periodization of premodern race and blackness via the phenomenon of “Black Madonnas” in Spain, France, and Italy from the late fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries. Informed by Premodern Critical Race Studies and Black Feminist Theory, the work argues that Marian blackness functioned as a metaphor for racialized desire and religious transformation, underscoring the spiritual and material significance of black skin in bolstering the white, Christian body politic. In her teaching at Bowdoin, DiMartino expands the geographical, material, and thematic scopes of Renaissance and Baroque art history, encouraging students to consider early modern European artistic developments as shaped by intercultural exchanges with Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Previously, she held the Block Graduate Curatorial Fellowship at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2020.