Marius Hauknes

Biography

Marius B. Hauknes is a historian of medieval art whose research focuses on the intersections of art, science, and myth. His first book, Art, Knowledge, and Papal Politics in Medieval Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2025), presents the first comprehensive study of the thirteenth-century fresco cycle in the Aula Gotica (“Gothic Hall”) of Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome, one of the most significant monuments of medieval Italian painting. The book argues that the Aula Gotica functioned as a large-scale encyclopedia—an immersive environment designed to stimulate intellectual inquiry and philosophical reflection. By reassessing Rome’s artistic culture in the mid-thirteenth century, it counters the assumption that the city lagged behind other centers, instead showing it to be a site of experimentation and innovation. In doing so, the book reconstructs a largely lost tradition of papal art patronage that placed secular learning at the heart of visual production and positions Rome as a key locus for the emergence of learned visual culture in medieval Italy.

His current book project, Biblical Mythology in Medieval Art, explores how medieval artists drew on the mythological dimensions of scripture to shape theological and political discourse. Challenging the long-standing assumption that medieval mythological imagery derived primarily from Greco-Roman sources, the book foregrounds the Bible’s own mythic narratives—often rooted in ancient Near Eastern cosmologies—as central to medieval visual culture. Through case studies on creation and chaos, the origins of knowledge, Christ’s cosmic attributes, and the story of Babel, it demonstrates how artists reimagined scripture’s mythic dimensions to engage contemporary discourses on the fragility of creation, the authority of papal and imperial power, the foundations of human learning, and the shifting boundaries of religious and cultural identity.

Before joining Notre Dame, Hauknes was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago (2016-2017) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2014-2016). His research has also been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2011–2013; 2022–2023), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2019–2020). His articles have appeared in leading journals including Gesta, The Art Bulletin, and Studies in Iconography. His essay “Painting Against Time: Spectatorship and Visual Entanglement in the Anagni Crypt” received the 2022 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association.