Skip to main content Skip to navigation

History of Art

Dr Livia Lupi

About

Livia Lupi joined Warwick in 2018 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. Her book, Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy: Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice, was recently submitted to Harvey Miller. Arguing that architecture in painting provided a unique platform for experimentation, the book contends that the architectural imagination of artists was instrumental in redefining the status of architectural forms as a kind of cultural currency. As it explores the nexus between innovation and persuasion, the volume highlights an early form of little-discussed paragone between painting and architecture which relied on a shared understanding of architectural invention as a symbol of prestige.This approach offers a precious insight into how architectural forms were perceived and deployed, be they two or three-dimensional, at the same time clarifying the intersection of architecture and the figural arts in the work of later, influential figures like Giuliano da Sangallo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Baldassarre Peruzzi, whose work would not have been possible without the architectural experimentation of early fifteenth-century artists.

Livia's research falls within the departmental theme of Art in Venice and Northern Italy.

She 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.

Research interests

  • Late medieval and early modern painting and architecture, especially in Italy
  • Representations of architecture in the arts of Europe and Asia
  • Exchanges between Italy and the late Byzantine world
  • History of rhetoric and its interplay with the visual arts
  • Architectural drawings
  • Painter-architect figures
  • Exchanges between Europe and early modern India

Teaching and supervision

  • Setting the Scene: Architecture and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy
  • Classicism

Selected publications

Book Manuscript

Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy: Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice (submitted to Harvey Miller September 2021)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Perspectiva and Prospectiva: Space and the Representation of Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy.”
    In Perspectives on Early Renaissance Pictorial Space, edited by Niko Munz, Sumihiro Oki and Charley Ladee. Turnhout: Brepols (forthcoming 2023).
  • “La rhétorique du lieu. Art de la mémoire et architecture dans l’Oratoire St-Georges de Padoue.” In La figure et son lieu dans la peinture des Trecento-Quattrocento. Mnémonique et poétique, edited by Anne-Laure Imbert. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne (forthcoming 2022).
  • “Fictive Architecture and Pictorial Place: Altichiero da Zevio’s Oratory of St George in Padua (c.1379-1384).” In Place and Space in the Medieval World, edited by Jane Hawkes, Meg Boulton and Heidi Stoner, 137-148. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.
  • “The Rhetoric of Fictive Architecture: Copia and Amplificatio in Altichiero da Zevio’s Oratory of St George, Padua.” Architectural History, 60 (2017): 1-35.

Specialist Translations

  • Titian’s Letters. In Titian: Love, Desire, Death, exh. cat., 194-195 and 197-203. London: National Gallery and Yale University Press, 2020.
  • (with Amanda Lillie) Sebastiano del Piombo’s Letters to Michelangelo, 1518-1531. In Michelangelo & Sebastiano, exh. cat., pp. 225-237. London: National Gallery and Yale University Press, 2017.
  • Alessandro Nogarola, La vita della Serenissima Reina Maria d'Austria, Reina d’Ungheria […] (n.p., 1553), pp. 22-24. Appendix 3 in Cordula van Wyhe, “The Fabric of Female Rule in Leone Leoni’s Statue of Mary of Hungary, c. 1549-1556.” In Cambridge and the Study of Netherlandish Art, edited by Meredith Hale, pp. 135-168. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.

Invited Talks

  • “The Agency of Architectural Settings: Invention, Time and Place in Fra Angelico’s Nicholas V Chapel.” Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome (29 October 2019).
  • “Drawing, Painting and Building Architecture. A Historical Perspective.” Andrew Phillips Studio, London (28 November 2017).
  • “Rhétorique du lieu: art de la mémoire et architecture dans la peinture italienne au XIVe siècle.” Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris (16 March 2017).

Qualifications

  • BA (York)
  • MA (London)
  • PhD (York)

Profile picture

Research Fellow

Contact

Tel: +44 (0)24 765 23436
Email: livia.lupi@warwick.ac.uk

F40
Millburn House
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7HS

Advice and Feedback hours

TBC

Teaching

Undergraduate modules

HA1A2 Introduction to Art History: Classicism and the Art of Christianity