Dr Alison Wright

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Email: alison.wright@ucl.ac.uk 		Dr Alison Wright

Alison Wright was an undergraduate at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she also completed her doctorate in 1992. Her thesis focussed on paintings by the Florentine workshop of Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, a research area which broadened to encompass sculpture, painting, goldsmith work and the common ground of disegno in the later Quattrocento; this work culminated in The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome, published by Yale University Press in 2005. Her interest in the relation between the production of Florentine art and patterns of patronage is reflected in the co-edited book With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 14343-1530 of 1998. The exhibition which she worked on in 1999-2000 at the National Gallery was accompanied by a book, co-authored with Patricia Rubin, Renaissance Florence: the Art of the 1470s. Articles have focussed also on issues in design/drawing, portraiture and in relief sculpture both actual and depicted. Her current research addresses changes in framing elements (ornamenti) in painting, sculpture and manuscript illumination of the later 15th to earlier 16th century focussing specifically on pedestals, cloths of honour and 'relief' frames, in order to show how they articulate, differentiate and complicate political, spiritual and artistic hierarchies. She has recently lectured on the touch and the low relief mode in the religious image-making of Desiderio da Settignano.

Alison Wright is currently supervising theses on 15th- and 16th-century art, especially central Italian, in ritual and patronal contexts, on sculpture and on framing. She welcomes doctoral proposals in the field of Italian art in all media in relation to social, political and religious issues and especially where concerned with material process and ideological function.

Current PhD students:

Francesca Migliorini (joint supervision): Paradise Illustrated: Words and Images, Images and Words in the illustrations for Dante's Paradiso by Botticelli, Zucari, Flaxman and Blake

Alison Harpur: Visual Culture and the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1445)

Harriet O’Neill: Renaissance and Neo-Renaissance Frames and framing at the National Gallery London (joint supervision of Collaborative Doctoral Award)

Andrew Murray: The Weepers on the tombs of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy

Nathanael Silver: Legends of Graven Images: A new historical perspective on Jewish visual culture in the Italian Renaissance

Publications

A list of publications is available from UCL's Institutional Research Information Service via the Iris link below.

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