Chiara Franceschini is Professor for Early Modern Art History at the LMU and leads the ERC project and team SACRIMA, The Normativity of Sacred Images in Early Modern Europe. Before joining the LMU, Chiara worked at the Warburg Institute and taught Renaissance Studies at UCL, London. Before and after her PhD (Scuola Normale Superiore, 2008), she received several awards, including a Newton International Postdoctoral Fellowship from The British Academy, ‘I Tatti Prize’ for the best essay by an early career scholar, a Fernand Braudel Fellowship (Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme/EHESS, Paris) and a Fellowship from the Italian Academy at Columbia University. Her work is situated at the crossroads of the history of art, early modern history and visual culture.

Cloe Cavero works on images and cults of child martyrs in early modern Europe, focusing particularly on the dynamics of conflict, negotiations and border-crossing with other confessions in Spain. Before joining SACRIMA as post-doctoral researcher in April 2017, she received her PhD in History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence. Since February 2021, she is Lecturer and Research Associate at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

In collaboration with SACRIMA, Dr. Erin Giffin questions sculptural and architectural normativity in her project “Devotional Translations: Early Modern Replicas of the Holy House of the Virgin.” Her work examines the devotional, communal, and political objectives behind regional permutations of the Santa Casa di Loreto, a Catholic pilgrimage site located in the eastern Italian region of Le Marche. Dr. Giffin completed her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA (2017). 

As PhD student of the SACRIMA team, Nelleke de Vries studies the migration and adaptation of iconographical inventions between Northern and Southern Europe in 1450-1550, in her project “Migrating Motifs. Sacred Iconographies, Inventions and Adaptations between Northern and Southern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”. Before joining the SACRIMA team in August 2018, Nelleke worked at the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, the Gemäldegalerie der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. She received her BA and MA in Art History at Utrecht University.

Since 2017, Eva Bracchi focused her PhD research on the career of Bavarian miniaturist Sigmund Leirer circa 1600, and his surviving records and artistic creations between Munich, Rome, and Spain. The project “Munich/Rome/Madrid: the life and artworks of Sigismondo Laire. Sigmund Leirer (Munich 1552 – Rome 1639) and the ‘maniera piccola’ around 1600” analyzes the “maniera piccola” genre and its geographical spread from Rome to other European countries. Prior to joining the Sacrima Team, Eva received her master’s at Roma Tre in 2014, and between 2015-2018 she worked on the ArsRoma project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History.

Katharina Vukadin joined the Sacrima team in August 2018 and is researching the connections between the trade in relics and the development of court collections in the early modern period. Tentatively entitled “Relic Networks in the Early Modern Period”, her dissertation project focuses on the collection of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Before starting her PhD, she studied art history and classical archaeology at the LMU Munich and worked on various DFG projects, in the archive of the Archbishopric of Munich and Freising, at the Bavarian Palace Department, and at the Münchner Künstlerhaus.

As PhD student of the SACRIMA team, Kethlen Santini investigates the theme of the “infernal” representations of America analyzing European images and iconographies of Hell and the devil in the Visualization of the “New World” during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Before joining the Sacrima Team in November 2021, she studied in Italy between 2018 and 2021, receiving a second MA in Arts from the Università degli Studi di Trento on an iconographic study of the Allegory of America displayed in the Florentine context of the late 16th century. Her BA and her first MA in Art History were obtained in Brazil, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Christina Lagao is the ERC Administrator for the Departments of Art History and Theater, as part of the Fakultät für Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.