Profile

Biography

BA (Auckland), MA, PhD (Courtauld Institute, London)

Amanda Lillie's research interests focus on fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian art and architecture, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which buildings and works of art were shaped by social and economic conditions and ideological concerns. She is currently writing a second book on Florentine Renaissance Villas. Other interests include domestic interiors, patronage, concepts of place, the early development of landscape painting, and relations between town and country.

Departmental roles

• Chair of the Combined Board of Studies
• English/History of Art Executive Committee

Research

Overview

Amanda Lillie began work on Florentine villas of the fifteenth century with the aim of questioning the urban bias in renaissance studies and of extending the narrow canon of renaissance villa scholarship that, in the case of Florence, was focussed almost exclusively on the Medici. Her book on the country properties of the Strozzi and Sassetti clans, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, addresses this problem by examining non-Medicean art and architectural patronage in the countryside. Rather than taking aesthetic merit as the criterion for selection this book examines a wide range of rural buildings by way of their historical, geographic and social contexts. A second book to be published by Yale University Press is a broader study of Florentine villas in the early renaissance exploring the interconnections between town and country, and addressing neglected areas such as the castellated villa, religious life in the country and the villas of the humanists. She has published on the villas and patronage of the Sassetti, Strozzi and Medici families, documents relating to the Piovano Arlotto, domestic chapels, memory of place, architectural models, a study of how renaissance buildings were conceived in relation to climate, Donatello's representations of air, and on Fiesole as a penitential landscape.

Research group(s)

• Architectural History and Theory
  
• Medieval Art and Medievalisms
• Sculpture Studies
• Renaissance and Baroque Cluster

Supervision

Amanda has wide interests in the history and culture of late medieval and early modern Italy c.1300-c.1600, and is committed to interdisciplinary work as well as to object-based art and architectural history. In the last few years Amanda Lillie has supervised successful PhDs on 16th and 17th-century Italian horticultural traditions and the emergence of the flower garden, on house, households and property management in fifteenth-century Florence and on the material culture of domestic religion in early modern Florence. Having worked extensively in the Florentine archives she is willing to undertake tailor-made training for individual PhD students working with specific types of document. She would welcome enquiries from those wanting to undertake postgraduate research in any of the above or related areas.

Publications

Selected publications

Books

• Florentine Villas In The Fifteenth Century: An Architectural and Social History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
  

Articles

• 'Fiesole: Locus Amoenus or Penitential Landscape?', I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance, Vol. XI, (2008), pp. 123-168
  
• 'Sculpting the Air. Donatello's narratives of the environment' in Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Donal Cooper and Marika Leino, Peter Lang, (Oxford, 2007), pp.97-124
  
• 'Planen für das Wetter. Microklima und Umweltstrategien in der italienischen Architekturtheorie und Baupraxis des 15. Jahrhunderts', in B. Busch ed., (Luft, Bonn, 2003), pp. 162-182 
  
• `Memory of Place: luogo and lineage in the fifteenth-century Florentine countryside', in G. Ciappelli and P. Rubin eds., Art, Memory and the Family in Early Renaissance Florence, (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2000)
  
• `The patronage of villa chapels and oratories near Florence: a typology of private religion', A. Wright and E. Marchand eds., With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1435-1530, (Ashgate, 1998)
  
• 'The Humanist Villa Revisited', in A. Brown (ed.), Language and Images of Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1995), pp. 193-215
  
• 'Lorenzo de' Medici's Rural Investments and Territorial Expansion', Rinascimento. Rivista dell'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Vol. XXXIII, 1993, pp.53-67
  
• 'Giovanni di Cosimo and the Villa Medici at Fiesole', in A. Beyer and B. Boucher (eds.), Piero de'Medici "il Gottoso" 1416-1469 (Berlin, 1993), pp. 189-205
  
• 'Vita di palazzo, vita in villa: l'attività edilizia di Filippo Strozzi il Vecchio', in D. Lamberini (ed.), Palazzo Strozzi metà millenio 1489-1989 ( Rome, 1991), pp. 167-182
  

Teaching

External activities