Dr Niko Munz

niko.munz@history.ox.ac.uk

Introduction

I am Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern and Modern Art History. My research interests lie in early modern and late medieval art, and span Germany, the Low Countries, France, Italy and England. I currently specialise in premodern image theory and connections between art, anthropology and law. ‘Renaissance Image Rights', my new research project, explores the legal dimensions of premodern bodily identity and representation. I also study modernist historiographies and theories of art. 

I studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge (BA and MPhil), later becoming Assistant Curator at the Royal Collection Trust. I completed a PhD in early Netherlandish painting at the University of York. I have also held a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, University of Oxford, a Curatorial Internship in the Paintings Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and an Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership Fellowship at the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Teaching

I convene the History of Art BA courses Introduction to the 'History of Art', 'Challenging Antiquities' and 'Art-Design-Architecture'. I am organising tutor for St Peter’s History of Art students.

Research

My first book, The Birth of the Interior Scene in the Age of Van Eyck, is under contract with Oxford University Press. It looks at the introduction of the realistic domestic interior into Northern European painting culminating in the first portraits of individuals in rooms of their own. It studies this birth of the interior from a philosophical and historiographical angle – that significant genre, which continues to serve purposes in relating image-making and subjectivity right up to the present day.

I also specialise in seventeenth-century Italian, Flemish and British painting and the history of collecting. I rediscovered a major lost painting by Artemisia Gentileschi which I published in 2023 in collaboration with Royal Collection conservator Adelaide Izat. I have published other articles on Artemisia's career, and I work on a long-term digital project on Charles I’s art collection.

Selected publications

The Birth of the Interior Scene in the Age of Van Eyck (under contract with Oxford University Press; forthcoming, spring 2027).

'Image Control: Corrections and Correctness in Northern Renaissance Portrait Drawings', in Drawing the (Artist’s) Body, ed. Elisabeth Oy-Marra and Alexander Marr (De Gruyter for the Phoenix series of the Institute for Art History, University of Mainz, forthcoming).

'Review: Hans Memling and the Merchants, by Mitzi Kirkland-Ives', The English Historical Review (2026), https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceag181.

'Artemisia Gentileschi in England', The Burlington Magazine 167, no. 1473 (December 2025), pp.1178-1191.

'Review of Exhibitions: Hugo van der Goes. Between Pain and Bliss (Gemäldegalerie–Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, March 31-July 16, 2023). Catalogue by Stephan Kemperdick and Erik Eising with the Collaboration of Till-Holger Borchert', Renaissance Studies, 38, no. 2 (April 2024), pp. 321–9 [https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12920].

'Artemisia Gentileschi’s "Susanna and the elders" painted for Henrietta Maria', The Burlington Magazine 165, no. 1447 (October 2023), pp. 1053–73 [with Adelaide Izat].

'Bernardo Bellotto, View of the Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana from Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo', in Bernardo Bellotto. W 300. rocznicę urodzin malarza, Eds. Artur Bardach and Magdalena Królikiewicz (Warsaw: The Royal Castle in Warsaw, 2022), pp. 125–27.

'Essay: Bernardo Bellotto, View of the Santa Maria della Salute and the Dogana from Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo', curatorial essay on the J. Paul Getty Museum Website (July 2022) [https://museum-essays.getty.edu/paintings/nmunz-bellotto/].

'Review: Gothic Sculpture by Paul Binski' [review article], Sculpture Journal 30, no. 1 (2021), pp. 87–92.

'The Lost Collection of Charles I', Royal Collection Trust (2018–19), https://lostcollection.rct.uk[digital project].

Catalogue entries [nos. 34, 39, 40–1, 43, 62–3, 69, 71, 73, 105–6, 130–34, 136] in Charles I: King and Collector, eds. Per Rumberg and Desmond Shawe-Taylor (London: Royal Academy of Art, 2018), pp. 238–9, 242–4, 249–50, 253–4.

'Charles I’s Picture Collection: A Digital Initiative', The Burlington Magazine 159, no. 1374 (2017), pp. 692.

'Canaletto and Neo-Palladianism', and catalogue entries [nos. 146–50], in Canaletto and the Art of Venice, eds. Lucy Whitaker and Rosie Razzall (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017), pp. 279–83, 300–09.

Catalogue entries [nos. 3, 4, 82, 115, 120] in Portrait of the Artist, eds. Anna Reynolds, Lucy Peter and Martin Clayton (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2016), pp. 42–43, 142, 195, 200.