Professor Susie Nash

PhD Supervision

Current

• Emma Bruckner, Patronage and Power: Political identity in illuminated manuscripts by Jean Colombe.
• Flora Clark, Painted with glass and fire: Limoges enamelling from the local to the global, c. 1470-1530.
• Leylim Erenel, The Artistic Patronage of the Bruges’ Confraternity of the Holy Blood in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.
• Charlotte Wytema, The Iconography of the ‘Virgin  with Fifteen Symbols’.
  

Recently completed

• Jessica Gasson, Tapestries on the Altar. Considering their Facture and Purpose in Fifteenth century Europe. 2026
• Susannah Kingwill, The Cross at the Valois Courts of France (c.1360-1422). Object, Relic, Image. 2026
• Emily Pegues, Jan Borreman and Sculptural Practice in the Burgundian Netherlands c. 1479-1520. 2025

Completed 2002-2022

• Nicholas Flory, ‘pro æterna salute dominæ ducissæ’: The Carthusian patronage of Isabella of Portugal and Margaret of York, Duchesses of Burgundy, 1430-1503.  2021
• Margaret Crosland, ‘Servans tous les jours’ : devotion, interaction, and familial piety in the Grandes Heures of Philip the Bold. co-supervised with Professor Alixe Bovey, 2021
• Emma Capron, Altarpieces in Late Medieval Avignon. Studies in Patronage and Reception. 2019
• Lydia Hansell, Patronage of a Prelate: Artistic Provisions for the Religious Foundations of Cardinal Jean Rolin (1408-1483). 2019
• Ann Adams, Spiritual Provision and Temporal Affirmation: Tombs of the Chevaliers de la Toison d’Or from Philip the Good to Philip the Fair.  2017
• Harriette Peel, Commemorating the Family in Late Medieval Flanders, 2017
  
• Rosamund Garrett, Cantebury Cathedral’s Choir Tapestry: Patronage, Production, History and Display. 2016
• Anna Koopstra, Inventing Realities, Picturing Salvation: Making, Meaning And Patronage Of The Paintings Of Jean Bellegambe (c.1470-1535/36), 2016
  
• Nicola Jennings, The Chapel of Contador Saldaña at Santa Clara de Tordesillas: New proposals about the chapel and its role in the fashioning of identity by an early fifteenth-century court converso, 2015
• Susan L. Green ‘O Radix Jesse’: The iconography of the Tree of Jesse in Northern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,  2014
• Samantha Darell, Late Medieval Mother-of Pearl Carvings: Making and Meaning. An Examination of a Material in Context from the Late 14th to the Late 15th Century in France, England and Italy.  2013
• Mayumi Ikeda, The Fust Master: Illuminator of the First Mainz Presses. 2010
• Melena Hope, Painted Chapels and Oratories in the Households of Fifteenth Century France. 2009
• Douglas Brine, Piety and Purgatory, Wall mounted memorials from the Southern Netherlands. 2006
• Elizabeth Cleland, More than woven paintings : the reappearance of Rogier van der Weyden’s designs in tapestry. 2002
• Ursula Weekes, The Master of the Berlin Passion and his public : the production and reception of engravings and metalcuts as inserted additions in manuscripts from the Rhine-Maas region, ca.1450-1500. 2002.

Research interests

• Late medieval and Renaissance art of all media in Northern Europe and Spain c. 1350-1500, most notably the following:.
• Early Netherlandish Painting, in particular  Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin.
• Arts made for the Courts of France for the Valois kings and princes, most extensively at the Chartreuse de Champmol (the Well of Moses and the Tomb of Philip the Bold), as well as their  inventories, metalwork panel paintings and reliquaries.
• Tombs and their production, meaning and materials, notably in France and the Burgundian Netherlands.
• Materials, their supply, trade, cost, properties and meaning, notably pigments, black Dinant marble and alabaster
• Technical art history and works of art as physical objects: conservation, restoration histories, fakes and pastiches.
• The visual historiography of Art History (how sculpture in particular  has  been reproduced since the 19th century)
• The Libretto of Louis of Anjou, its siblings and their afterlives.
• Simon Bening’s independent illuminations – materials, techniques and function.

Recent Fellowships

I Tatti, Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies,  Visiting Professor 2025-26

The courts of France c. 1400 sent fabulous metalwork to the Italian states, through diplomatic exchanges or trade. Others were acquired there by different means – war, looting, pawning. This fellowship was focused on  the  meaning, manipulation and re-framing (in many senses) of these hugely valuable objects which were often politically charged and virtuosic, made with techniques impossible to reproduce outside Paris at that period. Its starting point is the extraordinary, tiny, Libretto of Louis of Anjou (d. 1384), now in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo. This study, expanded to include two other almost identical, no lost versions, will be published as a book provisionally entitled Blood Brothers. Some of the results fo this research were presented at I Tatti in October 2025, at a conference in Florence at the NIKI  in honour of Gervase Rosser in November 2025, and as a keynote for the AAH conference in Cambridge in 2026

Leverhulme Senior research Fellow 2016-2018. ‘Making Lists, Inventories and Objects at the Courts of France’

Between 2016 and 2018 I was  the recipient of a major research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, working on  a  book provisionally entitled ‘Making Lists: Inventories and Objects at the Courts of France’. At its heart it is a study of visual culture of the courts of France in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, but seen through the lens of a particular form of  written artifact, the detailed inventories of the kings of France and the princes of the blood: these include Charles V (d. 1380), his brothers Jean de Berry (d. 1416), Philip the Bold (d. 1404), and Louis of Anjou (d. 1384), and Charles V’s son, Charles VI (d. 1422). These men (and it was mostly, if not exclusively, men) amassed vast collections of thousands of precious objects, termed collectively ‘joyaux’, which encompassed metalwork, precious jewels, chapel goods and textiles, robes, hats, tapestries, paintings, manuscripts, relics, dog collars, astrolabes, sundials, cameos, and a host of other ‘choses estranges’ like giants’ teeth and ostrich eggs. Most have since been lost, and much was dispersed and melted down even within their lifetimes, but recorded in a series of extraordinary, often loquacious, inventories – far more of them than I had thought at the start (I have discovered several previously unknown ones).   My research has focused not simply on what was described in these inventories – as fascinating as that is – but on how it was described – in practical and linguistic terms. These inventories were often made ad vivam and in one case at least, that of Louis of Anjou,  dictated by the prince himself. Louis’s inventory  includes nearly 4,000 items and has individual descriptions of its finest objects extending to more than 40 folios: it is thus an unparalleled, and untapped, example of late-medieval ekphrastic description – and of the patron’s voice. These are fascinating as things in their own right, remarkably varied in their form and function: most are bound codices, but some are rolls; some are on paper, some on parchment; many teem with marginal notes recording absence and presence, damage and repair; others have clear, wide margins, with not a trace of later annotations, beautiful script, and illuminated frontispieces.I have tried in this project to piece together how they were made, by whom and why (never as obvious as it might seem). But  I have also pondered how they were used over time, and how their significance shifted and developed: it seems to me that they often became repositories of cultural memory and ancestral power, symbols of French patrimony, long lost, but eloquent, nevertheless.

Some of the results of this research can be heard in my Professorial Lecture

Recent publications

Recent publications

• ‘Jan van Eyck’s Material Allusions’ in  ex. cat., Van Eyck. The Portraits. (London, NG, 2026-27),  pp. 19-39.
• ‘No Sorrow Like unto my Sorrow. Philip the Bold, the Great Cross at Champmol and the Battle of Nicopolis’, The Burlington Magazine, October 2024, pp. 997-1027.
• ‘The de Limbourg Brothers and Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych’ in Siena. The Rise of Painting, exh. Cat (London NG and NY Met, 2024), pp. 241-53.
• ‘The Martyrdom of St Denis, the Chartreuse de Champmol and the Battle of Nicopolis’, Maelwael Van Lymbourch Studies Vol II, ed A. Stufkens, Brepols 2022, pp. 12-45.
• ‘Ad Pedes Patrae. John the Fearless and the Third Tomb of Philip the Bold’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (forthcoming)

Articles and Essays

• ‘Inventory as Royal Object. Charles V and the Enumeration of Kingship’, The Medieval Book as Object, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, ed. J. Luxford, Donnington 2021
• ‘The Two Tombs of Philip the Bold’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2019, pp. 1-112.
• The Myth of Luis Alincbrot: Relocating the Triptych with  Scenes from the Life of Christ in the Prado’, Boletín del museo del Prado, vol. xxxii no 50,  2014, pp. 70-95. With translation in Spanish.
• ‘Les retables de Jacques de Baerze et Melchior Broederlam: Documentation, fabrication et signification’, in Les retables de Champmol et leur restauration (Dijon, Musee des Beaux Arts, 2014); also published in English
• ‘Erwin Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’ in The Books that Shaped Art History ed. R. Schone and J. P. Stonard, (London, Thames and Hudson, 2013), pp. pp. 88-101
• ‘Pour couleurs et autres choses pris de lui…the supply, cost, acquisition and employment of painters materials at the Burgundian court c. 1375-1415′ in Trade in Artists Materials (see above).
• ‘‘The Lord’s Crucifix of Costly Workmanship”: Colour, Collaboration and the Making of Meaning on the Well of Moses’ in Circumlitio. The Polychromy of Antique and Late Medieval Sculpture, ed. V. Brinkmann, O. Primavesi and M. Hollein (Frankfurt am Main, 2010), pp. 356-381
• ‘Claus Sluter’s ‘Well of Moses’ for the Chartreuse de Champmol Reconsidered’. Part I The Burlington Magazine, December 2005, pp. 798-809; Part II The Burlington Magazine, July 2006, pp. 456-69; Part III’, The Burlington Magazine, November 2008, pp. 724-741
• ‘The Parement de Narbonne, Context and Technique’, in C. Villers, ed., The Fabric of Images, European Paintings on Fabric Supports, 1300-1500, (London, Archetype Press, 2000

Books and edited books

• Late Medieval Panel Paintings. Materials, Methods Meanings II (Paul Holberton 2015); editor
• Late Medieval Panel Paintings. Materials, Methods, and Meaning I (London, Paul Holberton, 2011); author
• Trade in Artists’ Materials. Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700, co- editor with Jo Kirby and Joanna Cannon (London, Archetype publications, 2010).
• Northern Renaissance Art ( Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).
• ‘No Equal in Any Land’. André Beauneveu, Artist to the Courts of France and Flanders. (London, Paul Holberton Publishing in association with Musea Bruggee/Groeningemuseum, 2007).
• Between France and Flanders: Manuscript Illumination in Amiens in the Fifteenth Century. The British Library Studies in medieval Culture (London, British Library and Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999)
• Robert Campin, New Directions in Scholarship co-editor with Susan Foister (1996)

Other current/ongoing professional activities

• Trustee of the Caroline Villers fellowship
• Member of the International Advisory Board for the Department of Conservation and Technology
• External Examiner for PhDs at universities in the UK, Europe, Canada and the US.