Joanna Cannon’s impact on the study of late medieval Italian art has been profound. Her influence is felt as a scholar through the seminal publications in her bibliography and as a teacher who has trained numerous researchers active in the field, both as university academics and museum curators, across Europe and North America. This book is offered by her doctoral students as a celebration of Joanna’s remarkable career and achievements, and in gratitude for her dedication and generosity to her field, her students, her colleagues, and her friends.

Joanna’s scholarship is driven by a historically contextualised approach that, to a great extent, can be seen continued within the work of her students. This is coupled with a determined focus on the visual and material qualities of the objects under her examination. A close attention to the object – whatever that object might be: altarpiece, wall painting, votive panel, portable diptych, manuscript, metalwork, or ivory (Fig. 1.1) – has always been a fundamental tenet of Joanna’s research and teaching. Her concern with materiality is amplified by a commitment to analysing the physical characteristics of works of art by means of technical analysis, and to understanding the creative processes and working practices of artists. A further interest concerns the multifarious and changing ways in which viewers experienced the art of late medieval Italy. This wide range of ways of looking indicates the comprehensive nature of Joanna’s research, and helps to explain why she has been such a keenly sought-out collaborator by colleagues within art history and also in adjacent fields.

Joanna’s interests and approach were shaped by the fertile academic environment of The Courtauld Institute of Art and the wider University of London in the 1970s, where the study of medieval art and architecture flourished under the interdisciplinary aegis of Peter Kidson (the legendary ‘PK’ to Joanna and her contemporaries). Having already spent three years at the Institute as an undergraduate, she took her PhD on ‘Dominican Patronage of the Arts in Central Italy: The Provincia Romana c. 1220–c. 1320’ with Julian Gardner, who continued to supervise Joanna after departing The Courtauld to establish the History of Art department at the University of Warwick in 1974.