Planas Badenas, Josefina

Biography

Josefina Planas Badenas (Barcelona, 1957) is a PhD in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona and is full professor (catedrática) of Medieval Art History in Universitat de Lleida since December 2002, where she has been professor since 1992. Previously, she has been a professor in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1989-1992); She has been coordinator of the Unitat Departamental d’Historia de l’Art de la Universitat de Lleida (1995-1997) and member of the assessment committee for the musicographic Project of the Museu de Lleida Diocesà i Comarcal. Since 2008, Josefina has been a professor in the Doctorate School of the Cultural Goods Conservation Faculty in the Toscana University (Italy). She is member of the Società Internazionale di Storia della Miniatura (Florence) since 1998. She has been part of the editorial committee of the magazine Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum (2007-2010) and since 2011 of the Alumnia. Pagine Miniate, published in Padua. She has assessed the art expositions: «Medieval manuscript treasures» (The Hispanic Society of America, 1993-1994); and «El martirologi. Un llibre miniat entorn del 1400» (Museu d’Art de Girona, 1993). She has coordinated the cataloguing of Seu Nova de Lleida artistic vault (1995-2001).

As a researcher, she has specialized in the study of topics related to illuminated books, specially, in the analysis of books of hours conservated in Catalonia, as their use and function. Since the beginning of her professional career, she has perfected the artistic production of the painter and miniaturist Rafael Destorrents, through the incorporation of the artist’s inedited Works such as the Misal de Santa Eulàlia; at the same time, she has built the miniaturist personality of artist Bernat Martorell.

For the other hand, she has promoted the iconographic analysis of quite intellectually suggesting topics, due to its interdisciplinary personality, such as the women’s image in the Catalan gothic underworld, or the astrological/zodiac iconography, studies which appear in publications such as Libro del caballero Zifar (Barcelona, 1996).

She has published numerous of articles in peninsular and outside magazines: D’Art, Reales Sitios, Goya.Revista de Arte, Manuscripta Orientalia, Boletín del Museo e Instituto Camón Aznar, Imago Temporis, Alumnia. Pagine Miniate, Artigrama, among many others.  

She has included to the Catalan and Aragon’s patrimony list many wrongly classified or ignored manuscripts by historians. Among her many book chapters, she has written about this topic we find: European perspective. Manuscript illumination around 1400 in Flanders and abroad (Lovaina, Peeters, 1995), Maravillas de la España medieval. Tesoro sagrado y monarquía (Lleó, 2001), Alfonso X el Sabio (Múrcia, 2009), L’art gòtic a Catalunya. Pintura III, directed by Joan Sureda (Barcelona, Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2006), Libro de horas de Gulbenkian (LA 135). Libro de estudios, with de Aires A. Nascimento y Eberhard König (Lisboa-Madrid, 2009), La miniatura y el grabado de la baja edad media en los archivos españoles, under M. Carmen Lacarra (Saragossa, 2012), etc.

She is the author of many monographic publications studying Catalan illuminated books, such as El esplendor del gótico catalán. La miniatura a comienzos del siglo xv (Lleida, 1998); El Breviario del rey Martín I de Aragón. Un códice de lujo para el monasterio de Poblet (València, 2009); and Libro de horas del obispo Morgades (Barcelona, 2009), with which she won the second award of Premio a los Libros Mejor Editados 2010.

She has published with Javier Docampo, Horae. El poder de la imagen. Libros de Horas en bibliotecas españolas (Madrid, 2016). She has also coedited the catalogue Ars Sacra. Seu Nova de Lleida (Lleida, 2001) and Manuscrits il·luminats. L’escenografia del poder durant els segles baixmedievals (Lleida, 2010).

She has participated in national and international congresses, some worth naming such as “Thirtieth International Congress on Medieval Studies” (Universidad del Oeste de Michigan, Kalamazoo, 1995) and the “Thirty-Eighth Annual Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies” (Universidad de Saint Louis, 2011). In Europe, she has participated in «Manuscript illumination around 1400 in Flanders and abroad» al International Colloquium (Louvain, 1993); the seminar “Savoir et pouvoir dans la péninsule Ibérique au moyen âge” (Centro de Investigación Histórica de París, 2009); three congresses organized by Società Internazionale di Studi di Storia della Miniatura celebrated in Urbino (1998), Florence (2005) and Padua (2010), and “Pratiques religieuses et livres d’heures dans les sociétés d’Europe méridionale (xiiie - xvie siècles)” (2011), organized by Avignon and Vaucluse Universities. She has given conferences in many universities like Menéndez Pelayo (1994 and 1995); Valencia (2007); Institución Fernando el católico de Zaragoza (2008 and 2011); Udine (2010); de Roma La Sapienza (2010); at the Museu Cívic Medieval de Bolonya (2010); at the Centre d’Estudis Catalans of the Sorbonne University (2010); at the Instituto de Historia del Arte de la Academia de Ciencias of the Czech Republic (2011), and the Palacky V d’Olomouc University at the Czech Republic (2011), among many others.