Valentina Hristova

Born in 1986, Valentina Hristova worked for four years (2010-2014) on the Répertoire des tableaux italiens dans les collections publiques françaises (XIIIe-XIXe siècles) project at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA). She was a recipient of the Daniel Arasse scholarship (2012, 2013 and 2014) and has taught at the Ecole du Louvre and the universities of Grenoble, Nantes and Nanterre, where she held an ATER position between 2016 and 2018. The book resulting from her thesis, entitled ” Dépositions, Lamentations et Mises au tombeau dans la peinture de la Renaissance en Italie centrale. De Sandro Botticelli à Francesco Salviati”, defended in 2017 at the University of Grenoble under the supervision of Daniela Gallo, will be published in 2020.

Alongside her work on sacred iconography, Valentina Hristova has been interested in the fortunes of the Italian Primitives in France and Florentine female portraiture, as well as in questions of historiography. Her current research focuses on the legacy of Antiquity in Michelangelo’s painted work, the status of portraiture in religious painting during the Renaissance, and, more generally, the relationship between art and politics in the light of theological debates during early modernity.

The project she will be leading at the Villa deals with artistic patronage in the courts of northern Italy. At the crossroads of several disciplines, this investigation will follow the evolution of interest in the theme of the Dead Christ in Mantua and Ferrara between 1450 and 1550, questioning the porosity between sacred and profane in a broad cultural perspective, which will allow us to better grasp the interactions between religious images, society and princely ideologies on a European scale.