Emanuele Lugli

Emanuele Lugli is an art historian who specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian painting, urban culture, trade, and fashion. His theoretical concerns include questions of scale and labor, the history of technology, and the reach of intellectual networks.

An expert in the history of measurements, Emanuele has written a trilogy on the topic. The first book, Unità di Misura: Breve Storia del Metro in Italia (Il Mulino, 2014), reconstructs the revolution triggered by the introduction of the metric system in nineteenth-century Italy. The second, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness (University of Chicago Press, 2019), searches for the foundations of objectivity through an examination of how measurement standards were created, displayed, and envisioned by medieval communities.  The third, Measuring in the Renaissance: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2023), highlights measurement as a creative activity, which erases information as much as it generates it.

Emanuele has also published a study on hair and the bodily minutiae that shape desire in Renaissance Florence: Knots of the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence (University of Chicago Press, 2023). He has co-edited, with Professor Joan J. Kee, a collection of essays on the role of size in art making, To Scale (Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), and, with Finbarr Flood, a volume on non-Western measurement for RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (2025). Currently, he is working on a cultural history of “love at first sight” and a biography of the Italian painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614).

In addition to his academic research projects, Emanuele regularly writes for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Slate, Il Sole 24 Ore, Domani, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.