Dr Lucia Tantardini is an Art Historian at the University of Cambridge, U.K.
Born and raised in Milan, she graduated from the University of Pavia with a degree in Art History. She then worked for three years in the Old Master Drawings and Paintings Department at Christie’s Milan and London and for another three years in the Prints and Drawings Department of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Through these experiences she developed her passion and expertise on master drawings and paintings, which she consolidated while working on her PhD – also at Cambridge – on the Luini, a family of artists bridging the period between Leonardo da Vinci’s arrival in Milan and Caravaggio’s departure from that city. Her book Aurelio Luini 1530-1593. The Complete Paintings and Drawings is the first monograph on this artist (forthcoming).
Dr Tantardini’s scholarship is primarily concerned with the development of the arts of drawing and painting in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy, particularly Milan and Florence. Her wider research interests embrace the European Renaissance and Early Modern period – visual arts and theory – and drawings from the late Medieval tradition of modelbooks until today.
Since she was a doctoral candidate she has been lecturing in the Department of History of Art at Cambridge. A recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, she was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Milan, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and at the Dutch University Institute of Art History, Florence. She is now an Official Fellow at Clare Hall.
Among other conferences, she organised and convened the Cambridge International Study Days Drawing in Cinquecento Milan and Drawing in Seicento Milan. In 2019, she organised the interdisciplinary conference Leonardo da Vinci 1519-2019: Art, History, Science at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to mark the fifth centenary of the death of the Florentine master.
Lucia Tantardini 