Biography

Amanda Hilliam is an art historian specialising in Italian art c.1300-1600. Her interests lie in the relationship between artistic practice and theory, especially concerning making, materials, and the beholder. Her monograph, Carlo Crivelli and the Art of Analogy, is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.

Before coming to I Tatti she taught at the Courtauld and the University of York. Her research has attracted significant support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and I Tatti, where she has held several fellowships. She also held predoctoral fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the National Gallery, London. She has curated several exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed Carlo Crivelli: Shadows on the Sky at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Project Summary

This project proposes poiesis—or emergence—as a primary mode of representation in early modern art, using drapery as case study. It challenges the dominant account of Renaissance art as grounded in observation and system, arguing instead for the centrality of intuitive practices of making and meaning. Drapery’s unstable, formless character resists precise imitation, prompting artists to work through intuition, gesture, and the responsive handling of materials. Paint, ink, stone, and wood do not simply depict cloth but actively generate it: their properties shape folds, while the artist’s hand re-enacts the forces that produce them. Drapery therefore records an unfolding process in which making remains visible and generative.

Whereas traditionally, drapery has been treated as a stylistic or secondary element, here it is repositioned as a dynamic site where meaning is generated through the interaction of artists, materials and viewers. Drawing on firsthand experience of works of art across media, both Italian and northern European, early modern treatises, workshop practices, and experimental reconstruction, the project examines how drapery was made, theorised, and experienced. It also attends to the viewer’s role: the indeterminacy of folds invites interpretation, allowing meaning to arise through perception as much as through production.