Bruce Edelstein has been named the first Distinguished Arts Professor in NYU’s global network, after having served for over two decades as Coordinator for Graduate Programs and Advanced Research at NYU Florence. His research focuses primarily on sixteenth-century Medici court patronage, on art and architecture in viceregal Naples, and relations between Italy and Habsburg Spain. His books include Eleonora di Toledo and the Creation of the Boboli Gardens (Sillabe, 2022), and the exhibition catalogs, Miraculous Encounters: Pontormo from Drawing to Painting (Uffizi Galleries ad Getty Museum, 2018) and Eleonora di Toledo e l’invenzione della corte dei Medici a Firenze (Uffizi Galleries, 2023). He is delighted to be returning to the Medici Archive Project as a Visting Senior Research Fellow, after having been the first researcher appointed at the inception of the project in 1997. During the academic year 2025-26, he will be working on research regarding the patronage, collecting and display of portraits by the Medici and their contemporaries in Grand Ducal Florence.
