Profile

BA (Bristol), MSt (Oxford), PhD (Oxford Brookes)

I joined the department in 2023 as an associate lecturer with primary responsibility for teaching innovation and skills-based art history. My research focusses on early modern Italy, particularly the work of itinerant artists active on both sides of the Adriatic coast, the porosity between art making and theory, intermediality, and the role of objects and images in religious devotion. Before coming to York I was an associate lecturer at the Courtauld, where I designed and taught courses on the graphic arts, the interrelationship between art and music, and alternative histories of Renaissance painting.

I have held fellowships at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. My PhD, awarded in 2020, was a Collaborative Doctoral Award with London’s National Gallery and Oxford Brookes focussing on image-object dynamics in the work of Carlo Crivelli (c. 1430-1495). This research informed the exhibition I co-curated with Jonathan Watkins, ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky’ at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and provides a starting point for my monograph (due December 2024) for the Renaissance Lives series published by Reaktion Books.

I have a background in the commercial art world and conservation, and aspects of connoisseurship and technical art history are involved in my research and teaching. I also enjoy speaking with contemporary artists and reflecting on what their processes and ideas can teach us about pre-modern works of art.

Research

Overview

• Early modern art spanning both sides of the Adriatic basin, with a focus on Carlo Crivelli and his contemporaries in the Marche
• The material and technical complexities of drawings, prints and paintings
• Artistic poiesis and the participation of the nonhuman (nature, materials and tools) in the making process
• Intermediality, especially when expressed as competition, metapainting, or to enhance the characteristics of one media by way of another
• Sacred art, miraculous aesthetics, and the role of art in religious contemplation

The book I’m writing for Reaktion’s Renaissance Lives series tells a story of Carlo Crivelli’s career as an itinerant painter active in regional centres on the Adriatic coast. As well as offering new readings of Crivelli’s main body of work, I will be thinking about his playful approach to composition, and the viewer’s freedom to invest meaning in his paintings in ways that are afforded by often ambivalent iconographies and spatial structures. Paying close attention to local religious and civic customs in the Marche, I will ask how Crivelli’s paintings become efficacious objects with the power to protect, inspire devotion, and bring the divine within tangible reach of the faithful.

My new research project explores the eloquence of drapery and the ways in which nature is shown to act as an agent in the production of folds, whether shaping them by wind, gravity, water and light, or providing generative structures, such as the branches of a tree or rock formations, for drapery to imitate, as suggested by Quattrocento art theory and practice.

I’m also working on an article about a rediscovered altarpiece for domestic devotion by the fifteenth-century Marchigian painter Lorenzo d’Alessandro da Sanseverino. The research for this project is supported by a grant from the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund. 

Previous work concerned seventeenth and eighteenth-century receptions of Renaissance art through collecting, cataloguing and display practices. My essay on the parallels between Filippo Baldinucci’s curation of Leopoldo de’ Medici’s collection of drawings and his artist biographies, the Notizie de’ professori del disegno (1681–1728), received the Sir Denis Mahon Essay prize.

Grants and Awards

My work has been supported by the Association for Art History (2023), the Samuel H. Kress Foundation (2023, 2018), the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund (2022), the Getty Paper Project (2021, 2019), the David and Julie Tobey fellowship at I Tatti (2021), the Italian Art Society (2021), the Joseph F. McCrindle Curatorial Internship at the National Gallery of Art (2018-2019), the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (2018), an Erasmus+ studentship at the University of Camerino (2017), the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation (2016), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015-2020).

Publications

Book

• Carlo Crivelli (title TBC), under contract with Reaktion Books, due winter 2024. 

Exhibition Catalogues

• Hilliam and J. Watkins, eds., Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky (Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, 2022).
• Catalogue entries in Wealth and Beauty: Pier Francesco Foschi and Painting in Renaissance Florence, eds. Nelda Damiano and Louis Alexander Waldman (Georgia: Georgia Museum of Art, 2022).

Peer-reviewed articles and essays

• ‘A Rediscovered Madonna and Child with Angels by Lorenzo d’Alessandro da Sanseverino,’ forthcoming.
• ‘Sui polittici domenicani di Ascoli: storia, tecnica, devozione’ in OPUS KAROLI CRIVELLI. Le opere e la materia. Nuove letture su Carlo Crivelli, eds. Stefano Papetti and Daphne De Luca, (Ascoli Piceno: Capponi Editori, 2023), forthcoming.
• ‘Connecting Human and Divine: Carlo Crivelli’s Hybrid Media’ in Hybridity in Early Modern Art, eds. Ashley Elston and Madeleine Rislow (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 11-27. 
• ‘Filippo Baldinucci and the Drawings of Ludovico Cigoli’ in The Sir Denis Mahon Prize Catalogue (London: The Burlington Magazine for the Sir Denis Mahon Charitable Trust, 2018), 36-49. 
• ‘Set in Stone: Signing Carlo Crivelli of Venice,’ Venezia Arti special issue: La ‘firma’ nell’arte: Autorialità, autocoscienza, identità e memoria degli artisti 26 (Venice: Edizioni Ca’Foscari, 2017): 137-156. 

Reviews

• Book review of Thomas Golsenne’s ‘Carlo Crivelli et le matérialisme mystique du Quattrocento,’ The Burlington Magazine 160, no. 1385 (August 2018): 698-699.
• Exhibition review of ‘I Vivarini: Lo splendore della pittura tra Gotico e Rinascimento’, The Burlington Magazine 158, no. 1359 (July 2016): 580-582.

Media

• Di Paola, J. Webber, A Hilliam, A Continuous Shape (award-winning short film about the process of London-based stone carver, Anna Rubicam), 2017

Commercial Gallery catalogues and translations

• Hilliam and V. Rossi, Nature in the Spotlight: European Still Life 1600-1800 (Rome: De Luca Editori, 2014).
• Hilliam and V. Rossi, The Splendours of Venice: View Paintings from the Eighteenth Century (Rome: De Luca Editori, 2014)
• Savoia, S. Bosi, eds., Boldini, English translation A. Hilliam (Milan: Bottegantica, 2015).
• Bacchi, F. Berti, D. Pegazzano, eds., Rondoni and Balassi: The Patronage of Domenico Maria Corsi, English translation A. Hilliam (Milan: Galleria Orsi, 2015).

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Museology and Curatorship
• Dissertation Training

Postgraduate

• Research Skills and Methods in the History of Art

Departmental Roles

• Careers Employability Coordinator
• Library Officer

External Activity

Exhibitions 

• ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (23 February-29 May, 2022), co-curator with Jonathan Watkins; co-curator with Laura Llewellyn of a special collections display at the National Gallery to complement the Ikon exhibition.
• ‘Venetian Prints in the Time of Tintoretto’, National Gallery of Art, Washington (24 March – 9June, 2019), assistant curator with Jonathan Bober
• ‘Raphael and His Circle’, National Gallery of Art, Washington (16 February – 15 November, 2020), assistant curator with Jonathan Bober
• ‘A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa 1600-1750’, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (26 March-3 uly 2022), contributed research on the National Gallery of Art’s drawings

Selected Conferences and Invited Talks

• ‘A Love of Line: Quattrocento Goldsmith-Painters and their Sharp Instruments’, Early Modern Tools of Artistic Production, Renaissance Society of America, March 2023
• Moderator of the panel ‘Displaying Devotion: Patrons, Artists and Pilgrims’, The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto, The Courtauld, June-July 2022
• Co-organiser with Linzi Stauvers of Encountering Carlo Crivelli: from the Workshop to the Museum, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, February 2022
• ‘Surprise. Carlo Crivelli at Ikon Gallery’, Warburg Institute, Curatorial Conversations series, May 2022
• ‘Drapery and Disegno in the Italian Renaissance Workshop’, The Working Renaissance, Warburg Institute, March 2022
• ‘Mute Eloquence: Drawing Drapery in Early Renaissance Italy’, Villa I Tatti Fellow’s Presentation, December 2021
• ‘Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky,’ curators’ talk at the University of Warwick’s History of Art Research Seminar, June 2021
• ‘Navigating Crivelli’s Paintings,’ New Perspectives in Italian Art, IAS sponsored session at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual conference, April 2021
• ‘Frame, Space and the Divine: Correggio’s studies for the Madonna of Saint George and the Madonna “della Scodella,”’ lecture delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., April 2019
• ‘Transforming Matter: Carlo Crivelli’s Hybrid Paintings,’ Hybridity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art, the Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, March 2018
• ‘Raphael and Sculpture,’ gallery lecture as part of the event series for the exhibition ‘Raphael: The Drawings,’ Ashmolean Museum, July 2017
• Co-organiser with Seonaid Rogers of the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership study day, Material Matters: Object-based Research in the Museum and Academia, The National Gallery, London, October 2017
• ‘Carlo Crivelli and Sensory Worship in the Marches,’ Ritual and Sensory Experience in Medieval Sculpture, Association for Art History, Loughborough University, April 2017
• ‘Crivelli and the Goldsmith’s Art: Shared Aesthetics and Technologies,’ 22nd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Student Colloquium: Medieval Collaborations, Courtauld Institute of Art, February 2017
• ‘Filippo Baldinucci: collezionista dei disegni di Ludovico Cigoli’, The Sir Denis Mahon Prize Lecture, delivered in Italian at the Pinacoteca “San Lorenzo,” Cento, November 2016