Meet Magdalena Łanuszka, a Polish art historian who is currently working as a Research Assistant at York Art Gallery as part of the National Inventory Research Project initiative, ‘NIRP in the North’.

My name’s Magdalena and I’m an art historian from Cracow, Poland, specialising in late medieval and early modern painting. I have been an academic teacher at the Jagiellonian University for 4 years now, where I have taught European art of all ages from Antiquity to the 21st century.

I’ve also worked as a project manager in an interactive agency, which taught me that academic knowledge can also be useful outside of the university.

Until March 2015, I will be working as a Research Assistant for ‘NIRP in the North’. The National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) was created to provide research on pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings in various British collections.

Information gathered will be added to the online resource ‘NICE Paintings’, which is published on the Visual Arts Data Service website.

It is a great adventure to work on the paintings collected in York – I have the chance to discover many interesting and often unknown aspects of the various masterpieces.

I especially wanted to work here when I learned that the collection contains nice late gothic panels. It turned out that I have also found some very interesting aspects in the paintings of the later periods – I am looking forward for presenting the results of my research.

History of art doesn’t have to be a hermetic knowledge, and the old masterpieces carry fascinating stories and secrets that are very interesting to contemporary readers, not only for the specialists – that is why I decided to start a blog on searching for curiosities in art.

It is available both in Polish and in English on my website. Some of my recent posts there focus on the paintings from York Art Gallery.