Lorraine de la Verpillière

Lorraine de la Verpillière (formerly Saint-Remy) is a PhD Candidate in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her current research examines the perception of Renaissance artistic creativity within a medical and biological framework, focusing on images representing digestion as a model for creation. She is currently in the process of completing her thesis is entitled: ‘Visceral Creativity: Digestion, Earthly Melancholy, and Materiality in the Visual Arts of Early Modern France and the German-Speaking Lands.' Lorraine's research is funded by the AHRC, the Cambridge Trust, and Pembroke college.

Prior to beginning her PhD in 2014, Lorraine received a Bachelor degree and a Master’s degree in History of Art from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In this two-year Master’s programme under the supervision of Prof. Colette Nativel, her first dissertation focused on the frontispieces designed by Peter Paul Rubens between 1609-1640 and their link with the so-called “Jesuit imagery.” Her second Master’s dissertation (entitled ‘Lost in translation? De l’Italie à l’Angleterre, le mécénat du cardinal Reginald Pole et son cercle’) researched the patronage of one of the major political and religious figure of the sixteenth century, Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500-1558), and formed the basis of Lorraine’s first article, ‘‘God is in the details’: visual culture of closeness in the circle of Cardinal Reginald Pole’(Renaissance Studies, 30: 752-772).

Lorraine has a long-standing interest in science as, prior to starting her BA in History of Art, she studied Physics, Chemistry, and Maths in a French classe préparatoire. Recently, she also took part in the Middle French Paleography Workshop organised by The Making and Knowing Project (led by Prof. Pamela Smith) at the University of Columbia in New York, where she received intensive training in Middle French manuscript reading and helped to the translation and digital encoding of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 – a sixteenth-century compilation of technical recipes written by an anonymous French craftsperson.

With her colleague, Lizzie Marx, Lorraine co-coordinated the Cambridge History of Art Graduate Research Seminar, Lent term 2018 on the topic of "Art and the Senses."