Valeria Paruzzo studied art history at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice (B.A., 2012) and at Humboldt- Universität in Berlin (M.A., 2017). Between 2014 and 2016 she worked for the collaborative research centre 644 Transformations of Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität and for various exhibition projects at the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Her Ph.D. at the Università di Trento (2018-2022) and two subsequent postdoctoral research fellowships at the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice and the Università di Trento (2023- 2025) have been dedicated to the study of the history of collecting, museums and the market for Old Masters paintings in nineteenth-century Europe, with a particular focus on Venice. She has organized conferences and published on these topics in various journals, exhibition catalogues and collective volumes. She lectures on the History of Museums at the Università di Trento.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of the history of early modern painting, the history of art trading & collecting and social history. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua in the framework of the IUSTITIAM project, she will be working on an atlas of the places in Europe where mercantile justice was exercised between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern age. By comparing case studies of decorative apparatuses in courts, lodges and fondaci in Italy, Flanders and the Hanseatic cities, we aim to analyze from a transnational perspective the iconographical nature and the transformation of the visual language that merchants employed to express their idea of law and justice.