Rodolfo Maffeis received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Florence. Prior to joining the Politecnico di Milano, he was post-doc researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut - Max-Planck-Institut, Florence; and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was the recipient of fellowships from the Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi; Istituto Veneto di Storia, Lettere ed Arti; Istituto Italiano di Studi Filosofici. He is a member of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), the Società Italiana di Storia della Critica d’Arte (SISCA), the Consulta Universitaria Nazionale per la Storia dell’Arte (CUNSTA) and the editorial board of the art journal ‘Venezia Arti’.

Prof. Maffeis specializes in early modern art, with a focus on late Renaissance and Baroque Italian painting. His researches mainly address Florentine artists, their connections with the Medici court and the broader context of literary and scientific culture of the sixteenth- and seventeenth- centuries. He curated a monographic exhibition on the painter Francesco Furini at Palazzo Pitti, Florence, co-authored the catalogues of Giambologna, Artemisia Gentileschi and published a book on Benedetto Luti and Arcadian Rome. A further line of research involves Venetian painting of the Settecento; he is currently working on a project on Sebastiano Ricci and Visual Culture.

His research interests also include the work of Leonardo da Vinci: notably the master’s writings on astronomy and his strategies of visualization of celestial bodies. The outcomes of these researches have been presented in papers (RSA NY 2014; Politecnico di Milano 2015; Georgetown University, Washington 2018), conference proceedings (KHI-MPI 2015), and exhibition catalogues (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan 2011; Palazzo Reale, Milan 2015; Uffizi, Florence 2018). He recently co-edited three books on Leonardo studies: Leonardo da Vinci: metodi e tecniche per la costruzione della conoscenza (2016); Leonardo in Dialogue. The Artist Amid His Contemporaries (2019); Leonardo: arte come progetto. Studi di storia e critica d'arte in onore di Pietro C. Marani (2022).