Dr. Zuzanna Sarnecka
Zuzanna Sarnecka is an adjunct in the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw. She specialises in the material and visual culture of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on technical aspects of artmaking. After completing her first degree in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, she continued her studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she wrote her dissertation on fifteenth-century Umbrian wooden crucifixes. In 2013 she joined the ERC funded synergy project Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home 1400-1600 to pursue her interests in the relationship between devotion and craftsmanship in the late fifteenth-century Italy. She actively participated in the planning of the ‘Madonnas and Miracles’ exhibition held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2017. Since 2014 she was a co-investigator in the project funded by the National Science Centre titled: The Agency of Things New Perspectives on European Art of the Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries. She has led a four-year research project (2019-2023) funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (OPUS 15 scheme) on the devotional terracotta sculpture in the Papal States 1450-1550. At Warsaw she initiated an interdisciplinary project titled The Price of Failure: The Non-Destructive Analysis with XRF of Italian Renaissance Tin-Glazed Earthenware in Polish Collections (September 2021-June 2023). In collaboration with scientists from the Institute of Physics, University of Warsaw, from the National Museum in Warsaw, the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow, the Institute of Conservation of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the Institute of Conservation of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna and the Institute of Physics, Università degli Studi, Milan, she analysed the characteristics of glazes and the technical problems present in tin-glazed earthenware.
Her first book titled The Allure of Glazed Terracotta in Renaissance Italy (Brepols-Harvey Miller Publishers 2021) focuses on the relationship between devotion and craftsmanship in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art. Her new project focuses on challenges involved in the adaptation of technique of tin-glazed earthenware across Central Europe. She is an active member of the ICOM and the Renaissance Society of America.
Dissertation
‘The Della Robbia and Glazed Devotional Sculpture in the Marche’, University of Cambridge (2017), supervised by Professor Deborah Howard
Research project
Artistic Failures in Renaissance Ceramics
Research Foci
Early Modern Art| technical art history | archaeometry | multisensory perspective on art | agency of artworks | economies of cultural productions
