Francesca S. Croce is a Postdoctoral University Assistant in the Department of Art History, supporting the Chair of Early Modern and Modern Art History, Professor Sebastian Schütze. Her current postdoctoral project, Cura et Cultura: Physicians, Artists, and the Culture of Collecting in Baroque Rome, investigates the intersections of medicine, visual culture, and collecting in seventeenth-century Rome, focusing on physicians as patrons, collectors, and cultural intermediaries within the city’s elite artistic and intellectual circles.

Croce has been a Guest Scholar in the Bibliotheca Hertziana Research Group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” and a Research Assistant at the Josephinum Medical History Museum in Vienna. She has published in Paragone Arte, the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, and Anales de Historia del Arte, among other journals, and is the editor of Under the Lens: The Art of Discovery (Campisano Editore, 2024). Her teaching was recognized with the Teaching Award of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna (2025).

She holds a doctorate from the University of Vienna, completed with the support of the DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University. Her doctoral research examined the influence of Raphael on seventeenth century biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) and artist Carlo Maratti (1625–1713).