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Let’s talk about you: what is your background, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
My name is Valentina Sapienza, I am Sicilian, but I have lived mainly in Rome, Venice and Paris. I study Venetian Renaissance painting. I am mainly fond of images and their meanings, contexts, thoughts and thoughts through images.

Tell us about your academic path.
I studied at La Sapienza University in Rome, where I graduated and then specialised in History of Modern Art. My teacher is Augusto Gentili. For my PhD, I chose an international approach: after winning the selection in Venice, I joined forces with the Centre d'Etudes Supérieure de la Renaissance in Tours. France is my country of adoption, academically speaking. It was there that I had my first real job opportunities, despite my lack of any kind of network: I slipped a copy of my postgraduate dissertation into the mailbox of a great scholar I will always be grateful to, Maurice Brock, and a month later I received an invitation from the Louvre Museum to give a lecture. The programme included the names of some of the greatest scholars of Venetian Renaissance painting and also included my own. The museum auditorium was full: there were more than 400 people there, I was thrilled.
Then I started teaching while I was still doing my PhD: it was a fundamental experience that made me realise how impossible it is, for me, to separate teaching from research.

What has given you the greatest satisfaction in your career?
I recall two of them: when I was still a PhD student, I asked Michel Hochmann for a letter of introduction for a scholarship and he wrote that I was one of the most promising scholars he knew. And when I had just been hired at the University of Lille, I called Anna Bellavitis, who had been on my PhD committee, and she enthusiastically agreed to work with me on the 'Garzoni' project, dedicated to the apprenticeship of trades in modern Venice. The project was a success: we managed to obtain major funding from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the Fonds National Suisse, which made it possible to build a database with 54 000 documents. And to give many young people a job!

What do teaching and researching mean to you?
I always thought that I could not be a 'pure' researcher. It is in the relationship with my students that my research ideas grow, sometimes even take shape. Scientifically, I grew up in a permanent seminar: for years, we met every Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m., and then we always ended up being thrown out of the classroom by the caretakers of the Institute of Art History at La Sapienza because we were late. It was in this spirit that I founded the Centro Studi RiVe, dedicated to Venetian Renaissance visual culture, where, besides a prestigious international scientific committee, there is also a working group made up of many talented young scholars, with whom I work constantly. It is a real privilege for me!

Can you offer any advice to researchers in the early stages of their career?
That it is a difficult but beautiful world. Beyond indicators, which even the younger generations seem to be obsessed with (A-class journals, Wos, Scopus...), research is a slow and tiring business. That it takes even months, sometimes years, to study and write something intelligent and really new. That in humanities, the way research is currently assessed will end up distorting all (or almost all) of its virtues. That we should therefore be urgently concerned about this, that they should be the first to fight to prevent this from happening.