About

Livia Lupi joined Warwick in 2018 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. She works on late medieval and early modern art and architecture, and her research focuses on the intersection of artistic and architectural practice in Europe, especially Italy. In particular, her work addresses the communicative powers of structure and ornament, strategies of architectural representation, the relationship between design and craftsmanship, the emergence of the architect as a professional figure, and the production of architectural knowledge. She also works on the relationship between Western Europe and the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Livia's research falls within the departmental theme of Art in Venice and Northern Italy.

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“Livia Lupi has written the book about painted architecture that the field of Italian Renaissance art and architecture has long needed. Moving beyond the fixation on perspective representation, she addresses the many and varied ways painters employed architecture for narrative ends. Despite the prominence of architecture in many fifteenth-century paintings, few scholars have taken it as their central subject and when they have it has often been in relation to the issue of pictorial space. Lupi widens the lens, and through an in-depth analysis of several key case studies, opens up a broad set of interpretations. Featuring beautiful color illustrations and clear prose, her book is sure to inspire many other studies.”

Cammy Brothers, Professor, Northeastern University and author of Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture and Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

"This book explores the communicative power and astonishing variety of architectural representation in fifteenth-century Italian painting. Lupi illuminates three wonderful fresco cycles in different parts of Italy, each serving a different type of patron, and all designed to enhance reputations, strengthen authority, and shape specific identities. The meticulous research and fresh insights of this new study help us all to look closely at these vast yet strangely neglected parts of paintings, and to understand how widespread, engrained and inspiring depicted architecture can be."

Amanda Lillie, Professor Emerita, University of York and Curator of Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting

Published as part of the series Renovatio ArtiumLink opens in a new window, Harvey Miller Publishers, Brepols

Livia recently co-edited a special collection of articles for journal Architectural Histories, including her article “Brick and Mortar, Paint and Metal. Reassessing Craftsmanship in Renaissance Florence and Beyond”

She is also preparing a digital exhibition for the Sir John Soane Museum in London, entitled "Beyond the Painter-Architect: Artists Reinventing Architecture in Renaissance Italy" and scheduled for November 2024.

Service to the Profession

Livia works as an editor and specialist translator of early modern Latin and Italian texts, and is an active member of the US-based Italian Art Society and of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

She recently carried out a translation for an exhibition on Parmigianino at the National Gallery, for which she also translated a selection of Sebastiano del Piombo's letters to Michelangelo for the exhibition “Michelangelo & Sebastiano” (with Amanda Lillie, National Gallery, London, 2017), as well as letters by Titian to Philip II of Spain for “Titian: Love, Desire, Death” (National Gallery, London, 2020).

Between 2020 and 2023, she was the Editor of the Italian Art Society's Newsletter. Since 2022, she has been a convenor for the Architectural History Seminar, a series of research events organised by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research of the University of London.

Livia obtained her BA in History of Art from the University of York, her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and then went back to York to work on her AHRC-funded PhD, which she completed in 2016. Before joining Warwick, she was a fellow at the Warburg Institute in London and taught at the University of York and at the Courtauld Institute of Art.