Julia Rose Katz is the 2025 Anthony M. Clark Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and early modern studies. She is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. Her research explores how early modern artists and restorers creatively reimagined damaged ancient sculptures, transforming them with new forms and meanings. Like Circe’s mythical magic, these interventions altered antiquities through inventive restorations that reflected contemporary politics, intellectual trends, and patrons’ desires. Through four chapters, the project examines the artistic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of restoration, revealing how these imaginative acts shaped modern perceptions of the ancient world and resonate with today’s debates on historical preservation and reinterpretation.
The Academy checked in with Katz this month to see how her work is progressing.
What have you been working on while at AAR? Has your Rome Prize project changed?
I’m focusing on my dissertation, “Circe’s Wand: Reimagining Antiquities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800,” which analyzes the innovative reuse and alteration of ancient sculpture in both real and imagined senses. Last fall, my research involved closely examining the spolia (antiquities taken from other places) immured into the courtyards and façades of Roman palaces such as the Palazzo Mattei. I’m interested in the relationship between this process of thoughtfully arranging reliefs and sculptures in palaces and assemblage in twentieth-century art, as well as Lev Kuleshov’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory.
During my time here, I also completed an article on fantasy in a puzzle-like architectural drawing composed of two sheets of the interior of New St. Peter’s Basilica, which is forthcoming in Artibus et Historiae.
What is your most surprising discovery?
With the help of Giulia Barra, I gained access to several Roman palaces that are not normally available for public viewing. At the Casino Pio IV in the Vatican and Palazzo Giustiniani, I compared alternate approaches to recycling ancient fragments on palace façades.
I also began my first visual practice while in Rome. Since my arrival, I’ve been photographing with a Polaroid camera fragmentary sculptures, reliefs, columns, and ancient inscriptions embedded in Baroque and modern structures, as well as early modern monuments cloaked in metal scaffolding. I’m arranging each Polaroid thematically on a Washi paper scroll, which I unravel as I add more photos. This ongoing project will continue to grow after I leave the Academy and end once the scroll runs out of space.
How much did you use the Academy library? Where else did you conduct your research?
The library has been essential for both my dissertation and my forthcoming article. I examined the 1625 edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia and an engraving of an early project by Gianlorenzo Bernini for the baldachin of St. Peter’s in Filippo Buonnani’s Numismata summorum Pontificum templi vaticani fabricam indicantia in the Rare Book Room—thanks to librarian Paolo Imperatori—for my secondary project on the interior of New St. Peter’s. I’ve also carried tons of books from the library up to my office, which is my quiet respite, but I also like working in the busy bar with friends.
What have you seen in the city of Rome that has made a strong impression on you?
There’s something about walking along the lungotevere or winding through narrow streets near Via Giulia that I find most enchanting. I also love to walk through the nearby park, Villa Pamphilj, where the sculptor and architect Alessandro Algardi erected the Casino del Bel Respiro, a seventeenth-century building clad with antiquities, which features in my dissertation. On one such walk through Villa Pamphilj, I began my photo project documenting vestiges of the past.
How have your interactions with this year’s fellows and residents influenced your work or changed your perspective?
Although so many of my friends in New York are artists, there’s something unique about actually living among designers, composers, architects, and visual artists. My recent shoptalk with Devon Dikeou has informed my approach to understanding reused ancient fragments in architecture as found objects. She and I are collaborating on several projects while at the Academy, including a curatorial project titled Permanent Accident, which takes the form of a book that will be published in time for Open Stacks and Open Studios this June. For our shoptalk, Devon and I also co-curated the installation of New York–based artist Lizzi Bougatsos’s Self-Portrait (2012), an ice sculpture of her leg that melted away until we broke the piece as a performance at the end of our talk.
Conversations with fellows such as Matthew Connors and Giancarlo Tursi about montage theory, with Emily Mitchell on the cento form in Latin poetry, with Sheila Pepe on grotesques and caricature as a form of reimagining the past, and with fellow traveler Piergianna Mazzocca on reuse in twentieth-century architecture have also inspired my project.
How did your conceptions of the Academy change over the course of the fellowship?
I’m surprised by how central the dining table is for developing new ideas. Over lunches and dinners, my interests have broadened, and I’ve learned how often contemporary art inflects our understanding of the past(s).
What is coming up for you in the next few months?
In the coming months, I’ll be researching the reuse of ancient sculpture in twentieth-century films, which is the focus of one chapter of my dissertation. I’m looking forward to perusing the Cineteca Nazionale’s film archives, where I hope to find more information about statuary in films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, and Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, a scene of which was filmed in the Cortile of the Academy!
Although not formally announced until this summer, I’m especially excited to be an incoming fellow this fall in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I will continue working on my dissertation and hopefully make new discoveries while working closely with the Met’s collections and curators.