Alumna of the CSMC Graduate SchoolPhilippa Sissis Wins Publication Award of the Bibliotheca Hertziana

20 March 2023

Photo: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Page of a manuscript from Poggio Bracciolini (Hamilton 166)

The art historian receives the prize for her PhD dissertation ‘Seeing Script? The Visual Aesthetics of Early Humanist Manuscripts’, in which she examines the works of the great Renaissance humanists Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli.

The prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding art historical studies dedicated to the history of Italian art or architecture from late antiquity to the present day. In particular, it promotes innovative and interdisciplinary research approaches to Italian, Neapolitan, and Roman art and cultural history in their European or global context, which focus on epistemological or aesthetic questions.

The 2022 award goes to the art historian Philippa Sissis for her PhD dissertation ‘Seeing Script? The Visual Aesthetics of Early Humanist Manuscripts’. In this work, she deals with the two great Renaissance humanists Poggio Bracciolini, who rediscovered many classical Latin manuscripts, and Niccolò Niccoli, a copyist and collator of ancient manuscripts who played a key role in the development of the cursive script. Both lived in Florence around the year 1400. In light of the development of diverse script types since the early Middle Ages, through which the visual organisation of writing became an increasingly salient issue, Sissis is concerned with their philological, historical, grammatical, and orthographical work. The first part of her dissertation analyses the humanist aesthetics of the manuscripts of Bracciolini against the background of the visual traditions of manuscripts from the Carolingian to the scholastic era. In the second part, she explores the strikingly ‘modern’ appearance of Poggio’s manuscripts, embedding him in the cultural and artistic environment of early Renaissance Florence.

Philippa Sissis did her PhD at the Graduate School of CSMC, where she defended her dissertation in July 2020. After a postdoc at Universität Kassel, she re-joined CSMC in 2023 to become Principal Investigator of a new research project on ‘Echoes and Inscriptions – Art and Script in the Works of Artists in the Black Atlantic’.