Stella Wisgrill is an art historian specialising in late medieval and early modern visual culture, with particular interests in materiality and the epistemic dimensions of artistic practice. Her research examines the intersections of political theory, artisanal knowledge, and visual rhetoric in the German-speaking lands, with a focus on the cultural significance of mining and metallurgy and the transformative poetics of metallic matter. She is especially interested in how craft and material processes shaped ideas of princely and artistic self-fashioning in early modern Europe.
Stella recently completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where her dissertation – “(At)testing Virtue: Shine and the Materiality of Metals in the Construction of Habsburg Nobility (1477–1519)” – examined how processes of metallurgical transformation were mobilised to articulate claims to princely virtue, artisanal ingenuity, and divine favour. Her thesis engages with theories of virtue as a transformative force, cosmological hierarchies of matter, and the visual politics of shine and surface. She is in the early stages of developing this research into a book project and as part of her fellowship at the ZI, she will be preparing a related article on vision and self-knowledge in Emperor Maximilian I’s Fürstliche Chronik (1518).
Stella’s graduate research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK) and Sewlyn College, Cambridge. She has completed research and curatorial fellowships at institutions including the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and has co-taught undergraduate courses at Cambridge on visual culture in early modern Northern Europe as well as the collecting and display of art.