Joanna Woodall is a postgraduate supervisor in Art History at the Institute of Continuing Education. She is Professor Emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. An expert in the visual and material culture of the Low Countries in 16th and 17th century Europe, she is interested in how presence, value and knowledge are manifested in artworks and artefacts. Her edited book, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (1997), has become a standard work and in 2007 she published a major monograph, Antonis Mor: Art and Authority (Waanders), that uses this sixteenth-century, internationally renowned portrait specialist to explore a period of extraordinary change. In 2005, she co-curated Self-Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary, at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2016 she published, with Stephanie Porras, Picturing the Netherlandish Canon (Courtauld Books online: https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online/picturing-the-netherlandish-canon), which examines a 1610 series of printed self-portraits of Netherlandish artists. 2019 saw the publication of her co-edited volume Ad Vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800.
Joanna has a related interest in the ways in which works of art and artefacts are invested with and animated by concepts of love, friendship and desire. These ideas are explored in her article ‘“Thus am I accustomed to treat friends.” Engaging with a roemer engraved by Maria Roemers Visscher’ (2020). She has published a trilogy of deep-dive studies of how value was constructed in works of art and in precious coinage, beginning in 2012 with a reinterpretation of Quentin Matsys's well-known Money-Changer and his Wife 0f 1514. This was followed by ‘For love and money. The circulation of value and desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album amicorum’ (2017) and ‘Weighing Things Up in Maarten de Vos’s Tribunal of the Brabant Mint 1594,’ in her co-edited volume Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature c.1400-1750 (2022). Another strand of interest is the concept of virtue, the potency that was believed to be common to noble humans and precious materials. In 2005, she wrote the Introduction, ’In Pursuit of Virtue' for a volume of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) on this topic, and in 2020 published an article on Hendrick Goltzius's 1589 print The Great Hercules, the masculine exemplar of virtue.
Joanna's current research concerns a painting of 1632 by the Delft artist Christiaen van Couwenbergh of a woman of African heritage assaulted by two white men. She is also working on the artistic significance of paths in Dutch landscape.
Joanna is an experienced editor. Previously a longstanding member of the editorial board of the NKJ, she is now on the board of the Oxford Art Journal and the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. In 2018 she founded a Higher Education Network in the Association for Art History to resist destructive competition between university departments. This evolved into a Committee working to support art history in the HE sector, which she chaired until 2024.
As a scholar, teacher and curator, Joanna is committed to the creative and educational potential of collaboration discussion and close looking.
