Mariaelena Floriani

Mariaelena Floriani is a Global PhD candidate in Art History and Digital Humanities at the Universities of Genoa and St Andrews. Her doctoral project, «Overcoming the Loss. Restitutions to the Gaddi Collection», aims to reconstruct the gallery of Niccolò Gaddi (1537-1591), reframing the concept of loss through the notion of (w)holeness, a productive compromise between presence and absence within provenance history.

She is supervised by Prof. Eliana Carrara and Prof. Laura Moretti. Her PhD is fully funded by a PNRR DM 118 Scholarship (2023-2026). For the academic year 2024-2025, Mariaelena has been GTA Graduate Teaching Assistant for the modules AH1001 «Art in Europe and Beyond to 1600» and AH1003 «Art in Europe and Beyond 1600-1800» at St Andrews University.

Floriani’s research focuses on early modern Florentine art, with emphasis on portraiture, artistic literature, and antiquarianism at the turn of the 16th century. Her broader scholarly interests include the reception of the Cinquecento by 21st-century art historians, as well as the history of lost collections and their circulation on the global asset from the Renaissance to the present.

She received her BA in Art History from Sorbonne University (2019), followed by an MA from the University of Turin (2021) and a ‘Scuola di Specializzazione’ at the University of Genoa (2024). In 2022–2023, she was fellow at the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence. Her first monograph, «Il Cinquecento dimenticato. Dalle carte di Roberto Longhi», has been published with the Edizioni dell’Orso in 2025.