Joanna Woodall is Professor Emeritus in the visual and material culture of the Low Countries in 16th and 17th century Europe. Her current research relates to her Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Contemplating the Unspeakable in Netherlandish Art’. It focuses on an oil painting of 1632 by the Delft artist Christiaen van Couwenbergh (1604-1667), which depicts a woman of African ancestry being assaulted by two white men. She is also working on paths as artistic devices in Dutch landscape for a volume of essays entitled The Affective and Hermeneutic Functions of the Mindful Picture.
Joanna is an experienced editor. Previously a longstanding member of the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, she is now on the boards of the Oxford Art Journal and the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. In 2018 she founded a Higher Education Network in the Association for Art History to resist destructive competition between university departments. This evolved into a Committee working to support art history in the HE sector, which she chaired until 2024.
As a scholar, teacher, editor and curator, Joanna is committed to the creative and educational potential of close looking, discussion and collaboration. If you would like to talk through a project with her please write to joanna.woodall@courtauld.ac.uk.
Research Interests
Joanna is interested in how presence, value and knowledge are manifested in artworks and artefacts. Her edited book, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (1997), has become a standard work 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. In 2005, she co-curated Self-Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary, at the National Portrait Gallery and in 2016 she published, with Stephanie Porras, Picturing the Netherlandish Canon (Courtauld Books online), which examines a 1610 series of printed self-portraits of Netherlandish artists. 2019 saw the publication of her co-edited volume Ad Vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800, with an introduction co-authored with Thomas Balfe.
Related to this work is an interest in the ways in which works of art and artefacts are invested with and animated by concepts of love, friendship and desire. These ideas are explored in the article ‘“Thus am I accustomed to treat friends.” Engaging with a roemer engraved by Maria Roemers Visscher’ (2020). Joanna has published a trilogy of deep-dive studies of how value was constructed in works of art and in precious coinage, beginning in 2012 with a reinterpretation of Quentin Matsys’s well-known Money-Changer and his Wife of 1514. This was followed by ‘For love and money. The circulation of value and desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album amicorum’ (2017) and ‘Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594,’ in her co-edited volume Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature c.1400-1750 (2022). Another related strand of interest is the concept of virtue, the potency that was believed to be common to noble humans and precious materials. In 2005, she wrote the Introduction, ’In Pursuit of Virtue’ for a volume of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) on this topic, and in 2020 published an article on Hercules, the exemplar of virtue, entitled ‘Monstrous Masculinity. Hendrick Goltzius’s Great Hercules 1589.
Joanna has a number of publications adjacent to these major concerns, including articles on the relationship between classical and vernacular art in Antwerp (2011), the complex spaces of Dutch Still Life (2013) and the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and his companions (2016).
PhD Supervision
Current
- Kathryn Davies, working title ‘Incorporated monstrosity in the print culture of Antwerp c.1566-c.1600.’
Recently Completed
- Lorne Darnell, ‘The Pride and Beauty of this Land: Building Holland’s Identity through the Architectural Imagery of Pieter Saenredam.’
- Lorenzo Gatta, ‘Jesuit Confessionals in the early modern Southern Netherlands: Design, Space, and Materiality.’ (prize for the best PhD thesis in 2023-4 awarded by the VKKS, the Swiss Association of Art Historians).
- Alice Zamboni, ‘Bringing the muscles to life. Artists, anatomists and the negotiation of the graphic anatomical image in the Dutch Republic.’(funded by CHASE).
- Laura Sanders, ‘The image of the tower in 16th century Antwerp.’
- Talitha Schepers, ‘The Function of Artists and Artworks in Early Modern Diplomatic Encounters between the Habsburg Netherlands and the Ottoman Empire (1526-1574)’ (funded by CHASE).
- Albert Godetzky, Inventing the ‘Mannerist’ Body in the Early Dutch Republic, c. 1575-1615
- Austėja Mackelaitė, ‘Encounters in the Eternal City: Netherlandish Drawings after Ancient Sculpture in Rome, 1522-1617’.
Recent Publications
In press
- ‘Introduction: Questions of Money, Coinage and Art from the perspective of a European Art Historian’ for Kyoto Studies in Art History, vol. 3: Money, Medals and Coins as Embodiments of Values in Art
Published
- 2021 Natasha Seaman and Joanna Woodall eds. Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature c.1400-1750 Amsterdam University Press 2022. Includes:
Joanna Woodall with Natasha Seaman,‘Introduction. Embodying Value,’ 15-44.
Joanna Woodall, ‘Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594,’ 47-78. - 2020 Joanna Woodall, Bart Ramakers, Anne-Sophie Lehmann, ‘Ars Amicitiae. Introduction’ in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 70 (2020): Ars Amicitae. The art of friendship in the early modern Netherlands, 6-19.
- 2020 ‘“Thus am I accustomed to treat friends.” Engaging with a roemer engraved by Maria Roemers Visscher’ in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 70 (2020): Ars Amicitae. The art of friendship in the early modern Netherlands, 192-213.
- 2020 ‘Monstrous masculinity? Hendrick Goltzius’ The Great Hercules engraving 1589’ in Valerie Mainz and Emma Stafford eds., The Exemplary Hercules Hercules: a Hero for All Ages, Volume 2 of four volumes devoted to Hercules edited by Emma Stafford in the Brill series Metaforms: Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity, Leiden, 194-234.
- 2019 Thomas Balfe and Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction. From Living Presence to Lively Likeness – the Lives of ad vivum’ in Thomas Balfe, Joanna Woodall and Claus Zittel (eds.), Ad Vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800 (Intersections vol. 61), Leiden, Brill, 1-43.