Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann is Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. He received degrees from Yale, the Warburg Institute, and Harvard, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Technical University, Dresden, and the Masaryk University, Brno. The holder of the Palacký medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences, he is a member of the Swedish, Flemish, and Polish Academies of Science, and has been a Fellow of the American Academies in Berlin and Rome, among other honors and Fellowships. He is the author or editor of many books and articles on historiography, geography of art, art and science, Central European art and architecture 1450-1800, and global exchange in art.
Among his books are: Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting; Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724-1796; The Eloquent Artist: Essays on Art, Art Theory and Architecture, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century; Toward a Geography of Art; Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450-1800; The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance; and The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II, which won the Mitchell Prize as the best book of the year in art history.
He is now writing about global exchange in art and world art history.