About

The Founders of the Working Group:

Susan Bracken, MA, PhD, FSA

Completed her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1993 and her PhD on Collecting 1600-1650 at the University of Sussex in 2011. She is a regular lecturer at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at Birkbeck College, as well as courses for Ithaca College and Mississippi College.  Susan’s publications include contributions to Patronage, Culture and Power:  The Early Cecils 1558-1612 and The Evolution of English Collecting, as well as Ham House:  Four Hundred Years of Collecting and Patronage with an essay on copies of Old Master history paintings  and was a contributor to Painting in Britain 1500-1630: Production, Influences and Patronage.  Her research continues to focus on copies, replicas and forgeries.

Andrea M. Gáldy, MA, PhD, FRHistS

Trained as a classical archaeologist, Andrea M. Gáldy investigated Medici collections of antiquities for her PhD in the setting of antiquarian studies in sixteenth-century Florence. While the kunst- and wunderkammern of early modern Europe continue to play an important role in her research, she now focuses on digital forms of display and their possible impact on modern museology.

Andrea is a former fellow of the Henry Moore Foundation and of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (VIT05). From 2006 to 2011, she worked as professor for international art history programmes in Florence; she also taught art history at the British Institute of Florence between 2011 and 2012. At present she is lecturer in art history at LMU, University of Munich.

Adriana Turpin, MA Oxon, FSA

Adriana Turpin studied History at Oxford and then History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. She taught at Sotheby’s Institute for many years and was the Academic Director of two MA programmes on the History and Business of Art and Collecting, run by the Institut d’Études Supèrieures des Arts in Paris, validated by the University of Warwick until 2017. She remains a consultant and teacher at IESA on the history and business of the art market, intersections between art and luxury and the history of collecting at IESA. She has published on the history of furniture and the history of collecting, including essays on new world objects in the Medici Grand Ducal collections, 19th century markets and the collecting of furniture, as well as an essay on the different ways in which collectors placed value on their collections.

Abraham Bosse, “Galerie du Palais”, 1637-8, etching, Rijksmuseum