'Let the balance be just and the weights equal': Quentin Matsys's Moneychanger and his Wife in 1514

Professor Joanna Woodall read history at the University of York, with a year abroad at Vassar College. She trained as an art historian at The Courtauld Institute and began her PhD research at the University of Cambridge, as Speelman Fellow in Dutch and Flemish Art. Having spent several years in curatorial work at Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, and a year on a Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Leiden, she joined the academic staff of The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1986 as Lecturer in Netherlandish Art. From 2002-2005 she was Deputy Director, Head of Studies, with responsibility for the teaching and research programmes, widening participation and staff development. She has currently returned to her research and teaching. This year she is delighted to be involved in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation interdisciplinary MA on Visualizing Knowledge in the Early Modern Netherlands c. 1550 -1730, which she is teaching in conjunction with an historian of science, Dr. Eric Jorink of the Huygens Institute in The Hague.

Joanna has published widely in Art History, the Berliner Jahrbuch, the Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Her edited book, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester University Press, 1997), has become a standard work on the subject and in 2007 she published a major monograph, Antonis Mor. Art and Authority (Waanders), that uses this sixteenth-century, internationally renowned portrait specialist to explore a period of extraordinary change, involving both opportunities and dangers. Her most recent publication is ‘Laying the Table. The Procedures of Still Life.’ in Art History  2012: Dutch Art and the Erotics of Interpretation, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen.

She is currently a member of the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek  and joint leader, with Professor Bart Ramakers of the University of Groningen and Professor Christine Goettler of the University of Bern, of a NWO funded networking project ‘Trading Values. Cultural Translation in Early Modern Antwerp'.

The creative and educational potential of collaboration has been a longstanding interest. Her previous work in conjunction with others includes the exhibitions Rubens. A Touch of Brilliance (2003-4) and Self Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary (2005). She co-curated the latter exhibition and built her MA option that year around it; students were involved in writing catalogue entries. She is responsible for the website Picturing the Netherlandish Canon, an online project focused on a crucial early modern text on Netherlandish art and culture: Hendrick Hondius the Elder’s print series of artists, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effigies (The Hague 1610). This makes accessible online English translations by Daniel Hadas of the Latin texts relating to these prints and includes essays by Joanna Woodall and Stephanie Porras. Designed by Eva Bensasson, the website has an interactive dimension.