Clara Lieutaghi
Clara Lieutaghi is a doctoral student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales under the supervision of Giovanni Careri. She is working on 15th-16th century Provençal religious painting, and in particular on the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (att. Enguerrand Quarton, c. 1455, Musée du Louvre), for which she is seeking to reconstruct a hypothetical biography by situating it within historiography, anthropology and art theory. The presence of an inscription in the upper part of this altarpiece, whose appearance and function are central to the researcher’s questions about the legibility of the object under study, led her to consider all the epigraphs in the Provençal corpus, including those on two elements of the diptych in the Vatican Pinacoteca, also attributed to Enguerrand Quarton.
Clara Lieutaghi‘s residency at the Villa Medici (Arasse grant) is an opportunity to study in depth two characters – the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah – holding inscribed phylacteries, completing an important part of her thesis on the performance of the written word in the works of the region in question. The bibliography available in Rome also provides an opportunity to learn more about the origin of the Pietà inscription and its significance in the spiritual literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.