Biography

Susie Nash is the Deborah Loeb Brice Professor of Renaissance art at The Courtauld Institute where she has taught since 1993. Her research interests lie in northern Europe and Spain c. 1300-1550, across all media, with a particular focus on works of art as physical objects, their material and archival histories, their making, reception, conservation and afterlife. Her publications include Northern Renaissance Art (2008); Trade in Artists' Materials (2010); a series of articles on Claus Sluter's 'Well of Moses' in The Burlington Magazine (2005, 2006, 2008, 2024) and a major study of the tomb of the Burgundian duke Philip the Bold (JWCI, 2020).

Project Summary

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 project considers 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: containing 92 relics, encased in gold, enamel, rubies, pearls, mica and painted parchment, it folds into an object the size of a credit card. Its afterlife is as noteworthy as its physical form: lost or stolen on Louis' death near Bari, it moved through the Medici collections via papal hands to the Florentine Baptistry; there in 1500 it was encased in another reliquary, a tempietto-like structure created by a Florentine goldsmith. The Libretto and its biography provide a framework for considering wider questions of how metalwork was valued, bartered, transformed, gifted and displayed. It also prompts an exploration of the network of connections, diplomatic and financial, between France and Florence c. 1400, when Jean de Berry was a staunch supporter of the city, and again in the 1490s, with the invasion of Charles VIII, who carried with him on campaign an almost identical version of the Libretto; looted in battle at Fornovo, acquired by the Venetians, and now lost.