Ivan Foletti

Ivan Foletti is a professor of art history. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees in art history at the University of Lausanne, his habilitation and professorship in art history at Masaryk University in Brno, and his habilitation in church history at the University of Helsinki. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Art History Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg.

He specializes in the study of art history historiography in the Russian Empire, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and France. He also deals with artistic creation in Eurasia in the period of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He is interested in the use of social and anthropological approaches in researching the impact of the migration period on art in the Mediterranean region and on pilgrimage art in medieval Europe.

He has led ten national and international projects, including projects funded by by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Czech Technology Agency, and H2020 MSCA-Rise.

He has published more than 55 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of eight monographs, including From Byzantium to the Holy Russia, Rome 2017 [2011], Objects, relics, and migrants. The Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan and the Cult foletti.academia.edu/of its Saints (386–973), Rome 2020 [2018], and Russian Imperialism and the Medieval Past, York 2024 [Czech 2023, Italian 2025]. He is the director of the international journal Convivium (2014–) and the Hans Belting Library. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Bologna, Fribourg, Helsinki, Lausanne, Naples, Padua, Poitiers, Prague, and Venice.