Biography
Dario Donetti is a historian of Renaissance and contemporary architecture. The primary goals of his research are to understand the interdependence between graphic experiments and conceptual achievements in design practice, as well as to investigate the role of draftsmanship in architectural production, with a focus on issues of authorship and materiality.
Reassessing the function of drawing as a primary instrument of inquiry for architectural avant-gardes across time, Donetti’s studies have covered a wide range of topics, including: the activity of Tuscan and Roman architects in the sixteenth century, such as Bramante, the Sangallo family, and the circles of Raphael and Michelangelo, and Giorgio Vasari; the circulation of building technologies in the Mediterranean world; the history of collecting, photo-reproduction technologies, and the development of historiography in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century; large-scale design and the analogical methods of representation of monumental architecture in post-unification to Fascist Italy; radical utopias of the 1960s and their consequences for subsequent architectural theory. Among the results of these studies are the exhibition catalog Giuliano da Sangallo: Disegni degli Uffizi (Giunti: 2017, coauthored with Sabine Frommel and Marzia Faietti) and the monograph Francesco da Sangallo e l’identità dell’architettura toscana (Officina Libraria: 2020). Donetti is also the editor of the volumes Architecture and Dystopia (Actar: 2019) and Building with Paper: The Materiality of Renaissance Architectural Drawings (forthcoming from Brepols: 2021, with Cara Rachele), Viaggio nel Nord: Studi di cultura visiva in onore di Alessandro Nova (CentroDi: 2022, with Hana Gründler and Mandy Richter), and Giuliano da Sangallo e e le arti (Officina Libraria: 2024, with Sabine Frommel and Alessandro Nova).
Donetti is an Associate Professor of architectural history at the Università di Verona and serves as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, where he previously held the position of Collegiate Assistant Professor from 2019 to 2022. He also collaborates with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz as an Associate Scholar, and prior to this, he was a fellow and an Academic Assistant within the same institute from 2013 to 2019. In 2017 he was a Research Associate at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies of Columbia University, and in 2025 he served as the André Chastel Resident of Villa Medici and as a Senior Fellow at the National Gallery’s CASVA. Donetti holds an M.Arch. from the Università degli Studi di Firenze, obtained in 2008, and a Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, completed in 2016.
