Juliette Brack

Juliette Brack is a contractual doctoral student in art history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her thesis, prepared under the supervision of Professor Philippe Morel and entitled Textiles, materiality and revelation of the sacred in Italian Renaissance painting, proposes a study of the veils, curtains, canopies and carpets represented in images of worship and devotion in Italy between the 15th and 16th centuries. The aim of this work is to take into account the rich plasticity of the textile device and its different functions in the image.

In parallel with her doctoral research, she co-organised the international study days Ritual and image: textiles and the revelation of the sacred, which were held on 6 and 7 May 2021 at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in the framework of a collaboration between the University of Paris 1, the EHESS and the University of Burgundy. She is currently working on the publication of the proceedings of these days, scheduled for spring 2023.

Research project at Villa Medici: “The art of textiles and textiles in art: painting and material culture in Renaissance Italy

Her residency at the Villa Medici will be an opportunity to deepen one of the aspects of her reflection, namely the relationship between the fabrics represented by Renaissance artists and the fabrics of the contemporary material world.

As the problematic of her thesis is centred on the notion of materiality, it seemed necessary to question the link between culture and the development of the textile industry, and the way in which artists have – or have not – exploited this development in their works. This project aims to answer this question by following several complementary lines of thought which, from a historical and contextual point of view, touch on the manufacture and production of these fabrics as well as their place and uses in Italian society, before comparing them with their pictorial interpretation. The aim is to study textiles from the material to painting and its imagination, in other words from their social and cultural dimension to their pictorial metaphors and symbolic evocations.