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Ms Katie Ault

Profile summary

  • Research Student
  • Research Student
  • Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
  • School of Arts & Humanities
  • Art History
  • katharine.ault

Professional biography

MA Fine Art (Edinburgh), Post-Graduate Diploma Art Gallery and Museum Studies (Manchester), MA Art History (Open University).

I began my PhD in 2018 having completed my Masters at The Open University with Distinction. My MA dissertation was a short-listed runner-up for the Association for Art History's post-graduate dissertation prize 2017 (Katharine Ault: 'How did Ugolino di Nerio's Santa Croce Polyptych challenge and change the art historical canon between 1780 and 1887?').

Research interests

Giotto and Non-Giotto in Nineteenth-Century Britain

My research aims to better comprehend nineteenth-century British understandings and appropriation of Italian ‘Old Master’ art by examining the reception of the fourteenth-century Italian painter Giotto, from 1770 to 1920. My thesis adopts a holistic approach that takes account of developments in antiquarianism, art writing, journalism, markets, collecting and contemporary art production. Most importantly, I examine the hitherto unacknowledged role played by works misattributed to Giotto in Britain. I probe the criteria involved in attributing works to him and the circumstances that made their loan to exhibitions and acquisition by public institutions possible. By examining these misattributed works, I reclaim an important aspect of the construction of the story of art and its function in building the modern British nation.

The project is funded by an AHRC doctoral award through CHASE, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England. 

Impact and engagement

Journal

Katharine Ault, 'A Predella Panel from Cecco di Pietro's Agnano Altarpiece', The Burlington Magazine, November, No.1064, pp.766-770, 1991.

Conference paper

‘Private ownership, public display and commodification: Ugolino di Nerio’s Santa Croce Polyptych in nineteenth-century Britain’, Art as Commodities as Art, University of York, 14 June 2019.

Seminar paper

'A Queen in Manchester: "Giotto’s Coronation of the Virgin" at The Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition, 1857', Giotto's Circle, 20 June 2022.