Christel Andrik is a PhD student in Art History at Utrecht University. Her PhD research focuses on the influence exercised during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the (financially independent) wives of four Medici rulers on the collecting of artefacts from the New World (masks, codices, objects made of (semi-)precious stones, weapons, attributes and 'paintings' made of feathers).

The doctoral research engages in several fields of research, namely: collecting history, women's studies, and the history of colonialism. Central to this research are questions such as: how did colonial artefacts come into the possession of the Medici, what value did collectors attach to these objects and what function did they fulfil? Little research has been done to date on these so-called non-European, exotic objects from the New World that were in the Medici collection.