Lea Viehweger, M.A.

Lea Viehweger is a Doctoral Fellow in the interdisciplinary programme 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (October 2023– August 2024). She is a doctoral candidate supervised by Professor Alexander Marr in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. For her dissertation The Meaning of Plants in Portraiture and Visual Culture from German-speaking Countries circa 1470 to 1570, Lea explores the iconology of plants with a transdisciplinary approach. Working at the intersection of art history, history of science, and literature studies, she examines gender-specific attitudes to plants expressed in writings on medicine, marriage, and faith, and analyses their impact on visual culture ranging from portraits to biscuit moulds.

Previously, Lea worked as a research assistant at the National Gallery, London, for Dr Susan Foister’s scholarly Catalogue of German Paintings Before 1800 (forthcoming 2024). She obtained her M.A. in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute, London, with a dissertation on the ‘naked Judith’ in 16th-century Northern European art, and her B.A. in History of Art at the Albert-Ludwig-University, Freiburg (both with Distinction).