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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.
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.
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.
Amanda's supervision includes PhDs on:
Books
Chapters in Books
Articles
Practice-based Research
Edited CD-Roms