[1] Dead or Alive: Temporalities and Delimitations of Death in Early Modern Art

Berlin, March 26-28, 2015

Deadline-CFP: 20 may 2014

A panel organized by Itay Sapir (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Fabio Cafagna (Sapienzà Università di Roma).

The depiction of the moment of death in early modern art is at the crossroads of metaphysical, epistemological and aesthetic questions crucial for the culture of that period. The aim of this panel is to interrogate the representation of the transition from life to death and its ramifications for broader intellectual issues such as the nature of death, of time and of visual perception and representation.

In spite of the inherent ambiguity of fixing the moment of decease, Western culture has often considered death to be a punctual event, happening at a specific fragment of a second and unambiguously separating that which existed before it – a person fully alive, albeit ill or wounded – and the lifeless cadaver that that moment produced. This description is fraught with philosophical and scientific problems: what distinguishes life and death? When should a person be considered an inanimate body? Can time be infinitely divided into infinitesimal fragments?

While philosophy and theology could take up this issue or choose to ignore it, the visual arts as developed in Renaissance and Baroque Europe had a more pressing reason to tackle it: pinpointing the moment of death was, for them, a specific case of a broader set of crucial epistemological problems and the latter's concrete technical incarnations. Among the relevant issues are the relation between images, narrativity and time, the oscillation of anatomy between the aesthetic and the scientific, and the imagined vivacity attributed to lifeless visual objects, often, paradoxically, based on the artist’s observation of dead bodies.

Please send a short biographical note (300-word maximum) and an abstract (no more than 150 words) to Itay Sapir (sapir.itayuqam.ca) and Fabio Cafagna (fabio.cafagnauniroma1.it) by May 20, 2014.

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[2] Painting and Painters in Fifteenth-Century Venice (session series)
Renaissance Society of America conference, Berlin, March 26-28, 2015

Deadline: May 30, 2013

With its political and economic powers at their height, Quattrocento Venice was an affluent and cosmopolitan city that served as a principal entrepôt for trade between East and West, and ruled over a far-flung maritime empire. Painting flourished, and many of the finest painters of early Renaissance Italy, such as Jacobello del Fiore, Michele Giambono, the Vivarini, and the Bellini, made their home in the Venetian Lagoon. Many more visited, making Venice a thriving center of artistic exchange and the first city on the Italian peninsula to embrace painting in oils. Yet few book-length studies of fifteenth-century Venetian painters, excepting those on Giovanni Bellini, have been published by scholars in the last several decades. We invite papers that consider the painting workshops of Quattrocento Venice. A short series of sessions is planned, followed by a final round-table panel composed of scholars of fifteenth-century Venetian painting who will consider problems of scholarship and promising research for the field. Please send your paper title, abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, and a brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum) to venice.rsagmail.com or to one of the organizers: Joseph Hammond (jrmhammondgmail.com) and Daniel Wallace Maze (danielwallacemazegmail.com).

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[3] New Approaches to Sculpted Portraits
RSA Annual Meeting, Berlin, March 26 - 28, 2015

Deadline: Jun 1, 2014

Organizers: Kimberly Dennis (Rollins College), Kristin Lanzoni (Duke University), Ashley Elston (Berea College)

In the mid-sixteenth century, Benedetto Varchi noted that viewers of paintings are “conscious that those things that appear in the picture do not exist in reality. This does not happen in sculpture.” By their very nature then, sculpted portraits suggest, in ways that two-dimensional media do not, a multiplicity of questions surrounding how we understand presence and representation. Sculpted portraits appear in the Renaissance in an array of forms and materials: marble busts, full-length wooden figures, bronze medals, equestrian sculpture and metal reliquaries are but a few. This session seeks to explore methodological variety related to the rich field of sculpted portraits produced throughout Europe between 1300 and 1700. Studies employing approaches including, but not limited to, phenomenology, materiality, performativity and reception theory are particularly welcome, as are those drawing upon biographic and iconographic modes.

Please send an abstract of no more than 150 words and a CV to Kimberly Dennis (Rollins College) at sculptedportraitsgmail.com by June 1, 2014.