Pauline Lafille

Fellow
2018 - 2019

Art history

Biography

Pauline Lafille, born in 1986, lives and works in Paris. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and agrégée de lettres modernes, she defended a doctoral thesis in art history at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 2017. This work was awarded the Prix Piédallu Philoche by the Chancellerie des universités de Paris in 2018. A Renaissance specialist, she has taught as an ATER at Grenoble Alpes University and Sorbonne University.

After studying representations of battle in 16th-century Italian painting in her thesis, during her stay at Villa Medici she intends to consider these images of war as soundscapes, so much so that the motif of battle arouses an auditory obsession in contemporary music and poetry. As Paul Claudel had already suggested in L’oeil écoute, the aim is to imagine, against the ancient adage that defines painting as “mute poetry”, an audio-visual sensibility to Renaissance images, between cultural studies of sound, anthropology of war and modern art theory. Her research has been supported by scholarships from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the Casa de Velázquez, the Ecole Française de Rome and the Villa Médicis.

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Short-term Residency

Medici Residency André Chastel

with the INHA

Application 26.06 - 30.09.2025

Since 2010, the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA) and the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici have awarded two scholarships each year for research into art from the Renaissance to the present day. These grants are intended for established French or foreign researchers wishing to travel to Rome to carry out research. Candidates must either have held a doctorate for at least 5 years by the closing date of the call, or be curators or have recognized professional experience in a field of art history. The grant amounts to €3,000. Fellows are housed at Villa Medici for a period of four to six weeks, consecutively or divided between January 1 and December 31 of the same 2026, with the exception of the month of August.

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