Clara Lieutaghi 

A doctoral student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales under the supervision of Giovanni Careri, Clara Lieutaghi is working on Provençal religious painting of the 15th-16th centuries, and in particular on the Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (att. Enguerrand Quarton, c. 1455, Musée du Louvre), whose hypothetical biography she is seeking to restore by situating it in historiography, anthropology and art theory. The presence of an inscription in the upper part of this altarpiece, whose appearance and function are central to the researcher’s questions about the legibility of the object studied, leads her to consider all the epigraphs in the Provençal corpus, including those on two diptych elements in the Vatican Pinacoteca, also attributed to Enguerrand Quarton.

Clara Lieutaghi’s residency at Villa Medici (Arasse grant) is an opportunity to study in depth two characters – the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah – holding inscribed phylacteries, completing an important part of her thesis on the performance of the written word in works from the region under consideration. The bibliography available in Rome also provides an opportunity to learn more about the origins of the Pietà inscription and its significance in the spiritual literature of the 14th and 15th centuries.