Stella Wisgrill

Stella is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her research is concerned with the use of metals within the visual and textual rhetoric of Maximilian I’s efforts to legitimise his sovereignty and underline the nobility of his linage and ancestry. Her project explores how within the imagination of late medieval and early modern craftsmen and artists, material qualities became effective metaphors for the continuity of the Habsburg hereditary line as well as the nobility of individual rulers. Stella’s doctoral research is funded by the AHRC OOC DTP and Selwyn College.  

After completing her BA at Downing College, Cambridge in 2018, Stella continued with her studies in History of Art with an MPhil funded by the AHRC DTP Studentship. Her MPhil dissertation examined how raw minerals become artful objects in so-called Handsteine in 16th-century Germany questioning how ideas of rusticity added to their aesthetic appeal.