Franco Mormando (born 17 August 1955) is a historian, university professor, and author, focusing on the art, literature, and religious culture of Italy from the late Medieval period to the Baroque.

"[6] The Preacher's Demons went on to win the prestigious Howard R. Marraro Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Italian History, conferred (January 2001) by the American Catholic Historical Association.

[7] In the same years that he was completing The Preacher's Demons, Mormando was busy organizing at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art a major art exhibition of Italian Baroque art, conceived by him and entitled Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image[8] Opening in February 1999, Saints and Sinners had at its centerpiece the long-lost painting by Baroque artist, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ (Rome, 1602), discovered in a Jesuit residence in Dublin, Ireland, and subsequently given on indefinite loan to the National Gallery of Ireland.

Mormando's exhibition represented the first appearance of the newly-discovered painting in North America and, as such, garnered much attention from the world press and was visited by many thousands of people in its four-month run.

[10] Edited by Mormando, the exhibition catalog featured original scholarship by leading experts in Baroque art and culture, including one by Sergio Benedetti (the Dublin conservator who rediscovered and restored the painting) and two essays by Mormando, "Teaching the Faithful to Fly: Mary Magdalene and Peter in Baroque Italy" and "Just as your lips approach the lips of your brothers: Judas Iscariot and the Kiss of Betrayal."

Both essays represent surveys and analyses of extensive primary sources to discover what Caravaggio's original audience would have been taught about these three figures of New Testament history that are featured prominently in his art.

[11] The exhibition aimed to illustrate the hitherto-unrecognized deep and wide presence of the bubonic plague in Old Master Italian painting, as well as the civic role of art in a time of the pandemic.

[13] In the most recent phase of his evolving scholarly interests and publication, Mormando has turned his attention to the leading artist of Roman Baroque art and one of the most important influences on all of early modern European sculpture and architecture, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680).

Containing close to two hundred pages of source notes and a bibliography of over 600 titles, Mormando's Domenico Bernini edition, as the publisher's dustjacket explains, "is, in effect, a one-volume encyclopedia on the artist's life and work.

[15] As English art historian Claire Ford-Wille emphasizes in her review of the work, "Bernini: His Life and His Rome is a biography for the general reader […].