Andrea M. Gáldy

Andrea M. Gáldy is the founder of Collecting Central Europe. She gained her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Manchester in 2002. The focus of her research is on early modern European collections and on how trends and standards were then advertised and followed by collectors.

Markéta Ježková

Markéta Ježková studied French, Aesthetics (MA 2010) and Art History at
the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (PhD 2018). For many years, she
worked as an external educator at the National Gallery Prague. In 2019,
she joined the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences as a
researcher focusing on art collecting in the 16th and 17th centuries,
particularly in circles associated with Rudolf II's court and digital
humanities.

Catherine Troiano

Catherine Troiano is Curator of Photography at the V&A. She holds an MA in History of Art (University of Edinburgh) and a PhD in Visual Culture (Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester).

She was previously Assistant Curator of Photography at the V&A, and National Curator of Photography at the National Trust and has worked on major V&A projects, including the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society Collection (2016-17) and the launch of the V&A Photography Centre (2018;2023). At the National Trust, she co-led the collaborative research project Activating the Photographic Mass: Identity and History in the National Trust’s Photography Collections (2020-21) and initiated contemporary photographic collecting supported by the Art Fund’s New Collecting Award (2021). Catherine has curated or contributed to several displays and exhibitions at the V&A and elsewhere, and her research has addressed institutional histories, curatorial practice, CEE-region photography (also the subject of her doctoral dissertation) and contemporary or expanded photographic practice.

Aistė Bimbirytė–Mackevičienė

Aistė Bimbirytė–Mackevičienė's main research focus is on the history of collecting in Lithuania and on the traditions of Lithuanian aristocratic culture with its links to western Europe. In 2019, she gained her PhD from the Lithuanian Institute for Cultural Research with a thesis on “Count Władysław Tyszkiewicz and Western European Fine Arts in Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Collections.”

In 2016, she joined the Kazys Varnelis House-Museum (the National Museum of Lithuania), where she has been researching the collection, curating exhibitions and organising conferences. Aiste has published numerous articles and conducts guided tours through the museum. In 2021, she became Head of the Vilnius Paintings Gallery and also works as lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Adriana Concin

Adriana Concin is a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she is currently undertaking her doctoral thesis on the cultural and artistic exchanges between the Austrian Habsburg courts and Medicean Florence in the second half of the sixteenth century. She has worked as a Teaching Assistant at the Courtauld Institute, where she led seminars on the Italian Renaissance for undergraduate students. She has held the Eva Schler fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence and the Studia Rudolphina fellowship in Prague at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 2019 she spent three months working at the Frick Collection in New York on an exhibition on the Florentine sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. Most recently, she has published an article on the Habsburg cityscapes in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in the Burlington Magazine.

Anne Harbers

With a Master’s degree in Chemistry and an MBA, Anne Harbers spent 25 years working globally in Biotechnology. In 2014, she completed her M. Arts in Art History at the University of Sydney and has since published on topics relating art, science and collecting, whilst also lecturing in both University and Art Museum programmes.

She is currently undertaking her PhD through Radboud University in The Netherlands, working on a seventeenth century Dutch still-life & marine artist, Abraham van Beyeren.

Volker Heenes

Volker Heenes studied Classical Archaeology, Egyptology and Ancient History at the universities of Tübingen, Perugia and Heidelberg. He received his PhD from the Winckelmann-Institut at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and was awarded a fellowship at the graduate school of the University of Bonn "The Renaissance and his European Reception".  

Volker worked for several academic data-base projects, for example the "Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance" (Berlin), "Johann Joachim Winckelmann und die Antike" (Stendal) and  "Greek Painted Pottery" (Oxford). He is the author of "Antike in Bildern. Illustrationen in antiquarischen Werken des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts". He currently is senior researcher at the project “Jacopo Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus” at the Forschungszentrum Gotha, University of Erfurt.

Renate Leggatt-Hofer

Renate Leggatt-Hofer (until 2015 Holzschuh-Hofer) completed her degree in Art History, Archaeology and Philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1984. After post-doctoral fellowships at The Albertina Museum (Vienna) and at the Austrian Historical Institute (Rome), she participated in numerous research projects and exhibitions. From 1994 to 2016, Renate worked for the Federal Monuments Authority Austria (Bundesdenkmalamt) at the Research and Scientific Inventory Department; from 2010 to 2016, she served as the Head of the Executive Department for Public Relations. From 2005 to 2014, she took part in the research project on the Vienna Hofburg organised by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Renate currently works as an independent scholar.

Antoinette Maget

Antoinette Maget Dominicé is Professor for the value of cultural objects and provenance research at the Institute of Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich since April 2018. She was previously a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lucerne (2013-2018) and a scientific assistant at different French public institutions. She obtained her PhD in cotutelle in 2008, from the University of Paris-Sud (public law) and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (art history). She also serves as a member of the Funding Committee Colonial Contexts at the German Lost Art Foundation and of the Culture Advisory Councils NFDI4Culture.

Mark A. Meadow

After earlier careers as a Baroque oboist, caterer, housepainter and music publisher, Mark A. Meadow became a specialist in Northern Renaissance art and the History and Theory of Museums. Currently Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California Santa Barbara, his research interests include the relationship of art and rhetoric, early-modern ritual and spectacle, print culture, and, most recently, the origins of Kunst- and Wunderkammern, and the history of university collections. He is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (2002) and has also produced translations and critical editions of two important sixteenth-century sources: Symon Andriessoon’s 1550 Duytsche Adagia ofte spreeckwoorden (2003) and, with Bruce Robertson, Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 Inscriptiones vel tituli Theatri Amplissimi (2013). He is a co-founder and editorial board member of the book series Proteus: Studies in Identity Formation in Early-Modern Image-Text-Ritual-Habitat, with Brepols Publishers in Belgium.
Meadow's awards include fellowships and grants from the Kress Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Belgian-American Education Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Grant Program, the Delmas Foundation and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Meadow has held research residencies at the Getty Research Institute, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald, Germany and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Between 2006 and 2011, he was Professor (Hoogleraar) for History and Theory of Collections at Leiden University, in addition to his position at UCSB.

Elizabeth Pilliod

Elizabeth Pilliod is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Camden, has her M.A. MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has been the recipient of grants from the Kress Foundation, the National Endowments for the Arts, and a fellow of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, I Tatti. An authority on 16th century Florentine art, her previous and forthcoming publications have dealt extensively with tracing the provenance and original patrons and functions of works of art through research in the State Archives of Florence and Rome, the archives of churches, and private family archives.  

She is currently finishing Art & the World: Global Visions, co-author with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Pearson Publishing, forthcoming 2021/2. Her monograph Pontormo at San Lorenzo: The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece will be published by Brepols/Harvey Miller in 2021.  She contributed the section “Cosimo I de’ Medici: Lineage, Family, and Dynastic Ambitions,” and additional entries for the exhibition, Power and Identity: Portraits in the Florence of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, opening June 26, 2021.

Jana Alexandra Raspotnig

Jana Alexandra Raspotnig holds a BA in art history and law, she is currently a graduate student of art history at LMU Munich and of environmental ethics at the University of Augsburg.  Her research interests include cultural memory studies, heritage studies, and environmental humanities. Previously, she focused on provenance research, art law and the paths of heritage objects and cultural property. 
She has been a teaching assistant at LMU’s Institute of Art History since 2018.

With her family originating from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria, she is personally interested in the historical, cultural, political, and economic development of central Europe.

Cecilia Riva

With two Master's degrees in "Economics and Management of Art" and "Archaeology and Art History", Cecilia Riva gained her PhD in Art History from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, with a thesis on “Austen Henry Layard, collector and amateur. Diplomacy, Art History and Collecting in XIX-Century Europe”. From 2019 to 2020, she worked at Palazzo Ducale in Venice, where she has been researching and cataloguing the collection. Cecilia also led seminars on cataloguing cultural heritage for undergraduate and graduate students. Her research focus is on the history of collecting and art criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She currently conducts research as an independent scholar.

Franciszek Skibiński

Franciszek Skibiński holds a PhD from Utrecht University. He is an assistant professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where held a position of the Vice-dean responsible for scholarly matters and international exchange. Currently, he is also the Vice Director for scholarly matters at the National Museum in Gdańsk. In his research he explores the phenomenon of artistic exchange in Early Modern Europe, especially with regard to sculpture and architecture.

Recently, he published a book ‘Willem van den Blocke. A Sculptor from the Low Countries in the Baltic Region’ (Brepols, 2020). His other publications include ‘Early Modern Netherlandish Sculptors in Danzig and East-Central Europe. A study in dissemination through interrelation and workshop practice’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 63 (2013), and Between Paris, the Low Countries and the Baltic: an episode in the history of artistic exchange in sixteenth-century Europe’, Arts et artistes du Nord a la cour de Francois Ier, eds. Laure Fagnart and Isabelle Lecocq, Paris 2017.

Jeffrey Chipps Smith

Jeffrey Chipps Smith, professor and Kay Fortson Chair in European Art at the University of Texas, Austin, specializes in Northern European art 1400-1700, especially that of Germany and the Netherlands. Smith’s publications focus on Nuremberg and its culture, Albrecht Dürer, German sculpture, goldsmith work, Jesuits, Northern Renaissance art, patronage, and issues of historiography and reception, among other topics. His latest book is Albrecht Dürer and the Embodiment of Genius: Decorating Museums in the Nineteenth Century (2020) and another book Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire will be published by Reaktion Books of London in October 2022. He was articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and inaugural co-editor of the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. Smith served on the board of directors of the College Art Association, Renaissance Society of America, Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, Historians of Netherlandish Art and Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. In 2018, he was feted with a Festschrift entitled Imagery and Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Brepols).

Elke Valentin

Elke Valentin is an independent art historian and doctoral candidate working on a thesis on: “Pflicht und Kür. Die Meisterstücke der Gemäldesammlung im Nürnberger Rathaus (Burden and Artistic Freedom. The Masterpieces of the Collection of Paintings in the Nuremberg Town Hall)” at the University of Trier.

Elke received her training as museum assistant at the foundation Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten Baden-Württemberg, 2005–2007. She gained her MA in art history and Italian studies at Tübingen University in 2005.

Eliška Zlatohlávková

Eliška Zlatohlávková studied Art History at the Department of Art History of Charles University, Prague. She gained her PhD with a theses on the iconography of Rudolf II before starting to work at Studia Rudolphina, the Research Centre for Visual Arts and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II. Currently, she works as scientific researcher at Palacký University Olomouc and Charles University in Prague. Her main research focusses on art at the court of Rudolf II, spaces for art collections (studiolo, Kunstkammer) and princely collections of the early modern era. She is co-author of the monograph From Studiolo to Gallery, Secular Spaces for Collections in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown on the Threshold of the Early Modern Era and has written articles dealing with collection spaces and collecting in the early modern era.

Catherine Phillips

Catherine Phillips is an independent art historian. She was until March 2022 Vladimir Levinson-Lessing Professor in the History of Collecting at the European University at St Petersburg, where she set up a study group on the history of art exhibitions across the Russian Empire that produced several conferences and a database of exhibitions (work on which continues). From 1996 she worked on collaborative research, exhibition and publishing projects with the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Her main areas of study are Old Master drawings and collecting, with particular emphasis on Russian collectors and on the motivations of Russian collectors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She is working on a summary catalogue of the founding collection of drawings at the Hermitage Museum, acquired in 1768, and on Flemish drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Please contact us per email at
collectingcentraleurope@gmail.com