Biography
Professor Lydia Hamlett is Academic Director of History of Art & Visual Culture at Professional & Continuing Education (PACE), University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art at Murray Edwards College. Her research interests centre on the British Baroque and mural painting in particular. She is currently writing her second monograph, on early modern murals and the senses, and co-editing a book on the Women’s Art Collection (https://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/womens-art-collection). She has taught students at the University of Cambridge since 2003.
Publications
Books
Painted Interiors of the British Baroque: Art and the Senses (Lund Humphries, 2026)
Mural Painting in Britain 1630-1730: Experiencing Histories(Routledge, 2020, 2022)
Articles
‘Not just a Pretty Face: Women’s Heroic Experience in The Heroides, Book Illustration & Mural Painting in Britain, 1700–1720’, Women's Writing, 30:3, 226-257 (Taylor & Francis Online, 2023)
‘A sketch for the Petworth House staircase identified: new light on the oeuvre and patronage of Louis Laguerre’, The Burlington Magazine (December 2016)
The Sacristy of San Marco, Venice: Form and Function Illuminated’, Art History, 32:3 (June 2009)
Book Chapters
‘Baroque: The Longinian Turn in Early Modern Visual Culture’, in P. Cheney and P. Hardie (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Sublime (OUP, 2025)
‘Painted Architecture in the British Baroque’, in S. Frommel and P. Lombaerde (eds), A Challenge for Painted Architecture in Early Modern Times architecture on canvas and fresco painting (Brepols, 2024)
‘Allegorising the space between architecture and craft: mural painting 1630–1730’, in M. Hayes and A. Tierney (eds), Between Design and Making: Architecture and craftsmanship, 1630–1760 (UCL Open Access, 2024)
‘Painted Interiors’, in T. Barber, ed, British Baroque: Power and Illusion (Tate Britain, 2020)
‘Mural Cycles in Britain and Continental Influences’, in S. Hoppe, H. Laß, H. Karner (eds), Gemalte Herrschaft – Barocke Deckenmalerei an Europas Höfen um 1700 (Hirmer Verlag, 2020)
‘Spectators and Spectatorship in British Murals 1630-1730’, in D. McNeil and R. Huebert (eds), Early Modern Spectatorship: Essays on the Interpretation of English Culture 1500-1780 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019)
‘Rupture through Realism: Sarah Churchill and Louis Laguerre’s Murals at Marlborough House’, in M. Hallett, M. Myrone and N. Llewellyn (eds), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660-1735 (Yale Center for British Art, 2016)
‘Sure Gate of Heaven: the Sacristy of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari’, in D. Howard and C. Corsato (eds), Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Immagini di Devozione, Spazi della Fede (Centro Studi Antoniani 2015)
‘Longinus and the Baroque Sublime in Britain’, in N. Llewellyn and C. Riding (eds), The Art of the Sublime (Tate Research website, 2013)
‘The Longinian Sublime, Effect and Affect in “Baroque” British Visual Culture’, in C. van Eck et al. (eds), Translations of the Sublime: the early modern reception and dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in rhetoric, the visual arts, architecture and the theatre (Brill 2012)
