Lunarita Sterpetti, PhD

Lunarita Sterpetti completed her PhD in the History of Art at Sapienza, Università di Roma in 2022 with a thesis on the transition between the Florentine Republic and the Medicean Duchy through the analysis of Ottaviano de’ Medici’s Collection of Portraits. Prior to being appointed Academic Assistant in the Abteilung Gerhard Wolf at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – MPI in 2023, she was Assistant to the Chair of Art History and Criticism at Sapienza. She was the Eva Schler Fellow at the Medici Archive Project (2019), was awarded the NIKI fellowship at The Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History in Florence (2021), and will be Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) in 2023. She has co-organized the conferences The Medici Beyond Florence. Art and Politics, 1530–1648 (Florence, KHI, 2022) and Le tre età nelle Vite di Vasari (Rome, Sapienza, 2019). Her research has spanned the history of collecting, the political use of art, and the relationship between power and visual culture.

Her current research project focuses on the cultural, art-historical and natural heritage of the palace and town of Ottaviano, near Naples, in the early modern period, as well as on current approaches to preserving the site. The research is concerned with the agency of natural forces and their ability to shape artistic and architectural production in a broad transhistorical and geographical framework.