Profile
Biography
BA (Rice University), MA, PhD (University of California, Berkeley)
Jeanne Nuechterlein has taught at York since October 2000. Her work centres on northern European art, primarily Germany and the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries and its receptions in the 19th and 20th centuries, with further interests extending out to related geographical areas and periods. Her teaching and research investigates religious and secular imagery in the late medieval and early modern periods, particularly the cultural role of art for its makers, patrons and viewers. She is a member of York’s interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies as well as the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Currently she is completing a monograph on Holbein and the visualization of mathematical knowledge in the early sixteenth century. She has written two previous monographs, including Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World for Reaktion Books' Renaissance Lives series, published in 2020. She has also co-curated two exhibitions, Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance at the National Gallery, London (2014) and Making a Masterpiece: Bouts and Beyond at York Art Gallery (2019-20).
Research
Overview
Jeanne’s research has addressed a number of themes, including the nature and functions of sacred and secular art, and how they have changed over time; the impact of the Reformation on the visual arts; comparison between different artistic media such as painting, sculpture, prints, illuminated manuscripts, embroidery, and tapestry; conceptualization of period divisions; the impact of patronage; word/image/rhetoric relationships; interactions between art and science; and the methodologies applied to northern Renaissance art. Most recently she has been working on a project connecting the paintings of Jan van Eyck with complex systems theory, and she is completing a book on mathematical images in Germany in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries.
Research group(s)
Grants
- Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. AHRC-funded studentship with Dr Susan Foister at the National Gallery, ‘Settings and subjects in early Netherlandish painting’ (2017-)
- Collaborative Doctoral Award. AHRC-funded studentship with Dr Susan Foister at the National Gallery, London, ‘Shifting perspectives on German Renaissance Art’ (2012-2015)
- Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 9-month research fellowship for ‘Fictionalized Histories of early Netherlandish art’ (October 2010-June 2011)
- Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress. 11-month residential fellowship for research on rhetorical concepts in the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (October 2005-September 2006)
- British Academy Larger Research Grant. Research travel in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany for her project on early Netherlandish art (July 2005-December 2007)
- DAAD Research Grant. Three-month fellowship for research in Berlin to study the historiography of early Netherlandish art (July-September 2003)
Collaborators
Jeanne worked with Dr Susan Foister at the National Gallery, London, to co-curate the exhibition ‘Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance’ (17 February-11 May 2014), which examined the dramatic changes in attitude towards German Renaissance painting over the National Gallery’s history, from its foundation in 1824 to the present. For more on the exhibition and the collaboration, see our YAHCs page.
Jeanne's work on the exhibition was the subject of an interview for the National Gallery's February 2014 podcast, Why German Renaissance art made the Victorians blanch.
In 2016-2021, Jeanne contributed to an HLF-funded collaboration between York Art Gallery, The Bowes Museum and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (with support from the National Gallery, London) to interpret a painting from the Bouts workshop, St Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child. This painting became the starting point for the exhibition 'Making a Masterpiece: Bouts and Beyond' at York Art Gallery (11 October 2019 - 26 January 2020), co-curated with Dr Beatrice Bertram. For more on the exhibition and the collaboration, see our YAHCs page.
Supervision
Jeanne would welcome enquiries from potential PhD candidates concerning any aspect of 15th- or 16th-century German or Netherlandish art or its later receptions, or for co-supervision on late medieval interdisciplinary topics within the Centre for Medieval Studies.
In Progress:
Jordan Cook, ‘Settings and subjects in early Netherlandish painting’ (co-supervised with Susan Foister, National Gallery, London)
Amanda Daw, The role of iconography in the expression and promotion of Eucharistic piety in fifteenth-century York' (co-supervised with Jeremy Goldberg, History)
Peter Kos, ‘Bartholomeus Spranger’s Mythological Paintings: Gender Play in Rudolfine Prague’
Marisa Michaud, ‘Par le moyen et avis de sœur Colette: Piety, Patronage, and the Relationship between the Colettine Poor Clares and the Valois Court of Burgundy’ (co-supervised with Craig Taylor, History)
Niko Munz, ‘The Humbling of the Shrine: The Domestic Interior in Early Netherlandish Painting c.1400-1450’
Ellie Wilson, ‘Self-Fashioning and International Artistic Patronage of Merchants in Pre- and Post-Reformation London: The Merchant Taylors’ 1400-1610’ (co-supervised with Tim Ayers)
Awarded:
Claudia Jung, 'Visual translations of Jerusalem in the Early Modern Netherlands' (co-supervised with Hanna Vorholt), 2020
Hilary Moxon, ‘The Stained Glass of the York Minster Chapter House’ (co-supervised with Jane Hawkes), 2018
Nicola Sinclair, 'Nineteenth-Century British Perspectives on Early German Paintings: The Case of the Krüger Collection at the National Gallery and Beyond’ (co-supervised with Susan Foister, National Gallery, London), 2016
Justin Sturgeon, ‘Text & Image in René of Anjou’s Livre des tournois, 1460: Imagining Chivalry and Court Culture in the 15th Century’ (co-supervised with Craig Taylor, History), 2015
Zoe Dumelow, 'Visual Representations of Biblical Dreams in England, c.1200-1350' (co-supervised with Tim Ayers), 2013
Lucy Allen, 'Reading and Visual Processing in Late-Medieval Devotional Texts' (co-supervised with Nicola MacDonald, English), 2013
Holly James-Maddocks, 'The Scribes and Artists of Books of Middle English Literature in the Fifteenth Century English Metropolis' (co-supervised with Linne Mooney, English), 2013
Helen York, 'The Origins and Meanings of Hans Memling’s Landscapes’, 2011
Emily Richards, 'Body-Soul Debates in Late Medieval Manuscripts' (co-supervised with Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, English), 2009
Stephen Hanley, 'The Optical Concerns of Jan van Eyck’s Painting Practice', 2007
Elizabeth O’Mahoney, 'Representations of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Alchemical Genre Painting' (co-supervised with Mark Jenner, History), 2006
