A fully-funded PhD studentship in partnership with the Warburg Institute
Collaborative Doctoral Partnership
The National Gallery offers a small number of Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentships, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and run in partnership with higher education institutions. These studentships focus on specific themes relevant to the Gallery's collection and wider research themes.
Research project
The project’s overall aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the management and operation of painting workshops in Renaissance Italy. It draws on the case study of Perugino to challenge our understanding of the vast amount of serial and derivative paintings produced within the workshops of Florentine master painters in the late-15th and early-16th centuries. These ‘copies’ and versions of the commissioned images of master painters are paintings that are commonly ignored in the discussion of individual masters, yet were produced in great numbers in the workshops of nearly every Italian master painter.
The research will involve investigation of how Perugino managed production and used – and famously reused – material in two workshops, as well as how individual works were made by numerous assistants at different levels of expertise.
The project has three specific aims: (1) to deepen our knowledge of the range of production procedures and technical skills used in the workshops of Perugino, one of the most productive of 15th-century painters workshops; (2) to widen our comprehension of the skills and visual value that resides and resided in ‘workshop’ production; and (3) to contribute significantly to the knowledge base of paintings in the National Gallery’s collection.