Ravenna and Renaissance Imagination

Despite its rich corpus of early Christian monuments, ivories and mosaics, Ravenna has remained marginalized in the current histories of Italian Renaissance art, as if artists, architects and sculptors had been blind to the city's celebrated buildings and their decorations. The reality was far from our modern critical neglect, however. The sense of the city's crucial position at the crossroads of Eastern and Western traditions emerges from several images and texts of the early modern period. Yet it is only a comprehensive study of the Renaissance reception of Ravenna's early Christian architecture and decorations that can provide us with a nuanced history of the development of Italian art and the role of Ravenna in it. This call for papers aims at beginning this study seeking papers focusing on Ravenna's monuments, mosaics, marble revetments and ivories and their perception, reuse, adaptation and re-imagination during the Renaissance. Topics of interest could cover the drawings that Renaissance artists and architects made of Ravenna's monuments and their studies of problems of vistas and spatial viewing; the revitalization of the mosaic tradition and the concomitant reflections on the durability of painting; the reception of pavements and marble revetments of specific Ravenna's sites within broader concerns about the surface and appearance of Renaissance art; as well as reflections and reactions on the role of the Christian image, its function and efficacy in a renewed confrontation with Ravenna's extraordinary artistic manifestations.

Please send a 150-word abstract and a narrative CV (300-words maximum) to Giancarla Periti (giancarla.peritiutoronto.ca) by May 30, 2013.