Gerardo TOCCHINI

GERARDO TOCCHINI (Florence, 1967) teaches Modern History and Social History of Culture in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

He graduated in Literature, with a focus on modern studies, from the University of Florence and specialized at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris under the guidance of Daniel Roche.

His primary research area is the social history of culture in early modern Europe, from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, with a strong comparative orientation and a marked attention to historical cultural systems and fields of communication, employing interdisciplinary historiographical methodologies (literature, theater, music, visual arts).

He is the author of numerous essays and the books I Fratelli d'Orfeo. Gluck e il teatro musicale massonico tra Vienna e Parigi (Florence, 1998), and La politica della rappresentazione (Turin, 2001; 2nd expanded edition 2012); Minacciare con le immagini. Tintoretto: gli affreschi scomparsi della "Casa Barbariga" (Rome, 2010); Arte e Politica nella cultura dei Lumi. Diderot, Rousseau e la critica dell'antico regime artistico (Rome, 2016; english edition. Diderot, Rousseau and the politics of the arts in the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation Oxford, 2023); Su Greuze e Rousseau. Politica delle élite, romanzo e committenza d'arte nella tarda età dei Lumi (Pisa, 2016); Voltaire epicureo. Il mito del "Settecento libertino" (Rome, 2024); he is also co-author of the book Le muse in loggia. Massoneria e letteratura nel Settecento (Milan, 2002).

Between 1999 and 2006, he was a member of the permanent seminar on Material and Intellectual Cultures established at the Chair of Histoire de la France des Lumières at the Collège de France, and in 2020, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University