In the Public Eye: Viewing Monumental Funerary Architecture and Cults of Personality in Quattrocento Italy

My doctoral research at the University of Cambridge focuses on the ways in which visibility was anticipated in monumental tombs in Quattrocento Italy as a next step to cults of personality and/or veneration. I focus on the cases of persons whose commemoration had a strongly public character or served a certain public interest. In the four main chapters of my doctoral project, I explore case studies which illustrate the various ways in which the visibility of a person's monument within the spatiality of a church - whether permanent or ephemeral - was shaped in order to make it fit within a particular context. My doctoral project therefore explores the importance of ephemeral and permanent visuality to funerary monuments and commemoration in fifteenth-century Italy. By reconstructing the original locations of some monuments, their funerary rites and through the close comparison with associated written sources, I explore how the funerary monument was conceived in anticipation of the viewer's (lack of) access to the monument itself in order to convey deeper messages of commemoration and personality.