Alumni — Where Are They Now?
Jessica Savage
Jessica Savage completed the programme in Early European Art History at Christie’s Education in London in September 2008. Her Master’s thesis, titled Pilgrimage and Patronage: Relics, Gifts, and Souvenirs, England c. 1330–1500, investigated the iconography of art associated with local centers of pilgrimage in late medieval England.
At Christie’s Education, Jessica recalls the intense coursework in the visual culture of early Europe and the many opportunities to view works of art and architecture outside of the classroom. She believes that studying works of art at Christie’s with a dual emphasis on research and cataloguing practice helped create a firm foundation for her career.
Returning to New York City, Jessica was a cataloguer at Bloomsbury Auctions (now Dreweatts), where she worked on several rare book and manuscript sales of prominence, including the Harry and Virginia Walton Library (4 April 2009), the Paula Peyraud Collection (6 May 2009), and the De Orbo Novo Collection (9 December 2009).
In 2010, Jessica joined the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University, one of the most important archives of medieval art research in the world. As an Art History Specialist, Jessica researches medieval art collections and makes them available online, including her current work on manuscripts in the New York Public Library collection. In her time at the Index, Jessica earned a second Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Rutgers University. Her interests are in both the information world and medieval art history, especially representations of allegory and virtues in later medieval devotional books from France and England.
Jessica published an essay in honor of manuscripts scholar Adelaide Bennett Hagens, titled “Before the Parliament of Heaven: Visualizing the Reconciled Virtues of Psalm 84:11” (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2017). It presents a concise iconographic history of the subject known as the Parliament of Heaven, a popular medieval allegory depicted as an argument between the virtues of Justice, Peace, Mercy, and Truth. The subject, based on a psalm verse, had intermittent appearances in art and experienced a brief height in manuscript and printed Books of Hours from France near the end of the fifteenth century.
