Juliette Brack

Juliette Brack is a contract doctoral student in art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her thesis, prepared under the supervision of Professor Philippe Morel and entitled Textiles, matérialité et révélation du sacré dans la peinture de la Renaissance italienne (Textiles, materiality and revelation of the sacred in Italian Renaissance painting), proposes a study of the veils, curtains, canopies and carpets depicted in images of worship and devotion in Italy between the 15th and 16th centuries. The aim of this work is to illustrate the rich plasticity of the textile device and its various functions in the image. In parallel with her doctoral research, she co-organized the international study days Rituel et image: textiles et révélation du sacré, held on May 6 and 7, 2021 at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art as part of a collaboration between Université Paris 1, EHESS and Université de Bourgogne. She is currently working on the publication of the proceedings, scheduled for spring 2023.

“Her residency at Villa Medici will provide an opportunity to explore one of the aspects of her research, namely the relationship between the fabrics depicted by Renaissance artists and the fabrics of the contemporary material world. As her thesis focuses on the notion of materiality, it seemed necessary to question the link between culture and the rise of the textile industry, and how artists have – or have not – exploited this development in their work. This project aims to answer this question by following several complementary lines of inquiry 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. In other words, from their social and cultural dimension to their pictorial metaphors and symbolic evocations.