Phd in HISTORY OF ART

Research: The taste for furnishing noble residences: function, production, and fortune of Roman chimneypieces in the European market and collecting from the 17th to the 19th century

Romana Mastrella (Rome, 1995) earned her BA in Art History in 2018 with a thesis on Seventeenth-Century Istoriato Ceramics in Rome (supervisor: Prof. Massimo Moretti). In 2021 she completed her MA with distinction at the same university, with a thesis on the collection of pharmacy maiolica preserved in the Monumental Complex of Santo Spirito in Sassia (supervisor: Prof. Massimo Moretti; co-supervisor: Prof. Caterina Volpi).
Alongside her academic training, from 2018 to 2023 she worked in a prestigious antiques gallery in Rome. Combining scholarly research with experience in the art market, she identified a pair of previously unknown istoriato amphorae by Pietro Papi, a seventeenth-century potter from Urbania; the works were recently acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and are the subject of her article published in The Burlington Magazine (August 2025).
Between February and April 2023 she served as an external consultant for the Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm, contributing to the study and cataloguing of the museum’s maiolica collection. In May of the same year she was awarded a research grant from the C.M. Lerici Foundation for a project titled Italian Renaissance Maiolica in the Collection of the Nationalmuseum of Stockholm.
Since 2023 she has been curator of a project at the Archivio Storico Capitolino in Rome, dedicated to creating a database of artists active in Rome between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in the field of decorative arts, based on systematic archival research.
In 2024 she completed a six-month fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she catalogued and conducted provenance research on approximately 1,890 prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
She is currently a PhD candidate (39th cycle) in History of Art at Sapienza University of Rome, working on a dissertation titled The taste for furnishing noble residences: function, production, and fortune of Roman chimneypieces in the European market and collecting from the 17th to the 19th century.