[1] Bellini 500

This session series, sponsored by the History of Art and Architecture - RSA Discipline Group, commemorates the 500th anniversary of Giovanni Bellini's death by presenting the latest research on the artist's life and career. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Questions of biography, chronology, attribution, and historiography
- Bellini’s depiction of space and consideration of the viewer’s field of vision
- Bellini’s responses to ancient, humanist, and clerical texts
- Bellini and materiality: technique; workshop practices; recent conservation and new technical studies
- Bellini and globalism: responses to the North, the Mediterranean, and the East
- Bellini’s ongoing receptivity to the artistic, intellectual, and social world of Venice and the terra firma
- Aspects of Bellini's influence on the course of Western art

By May 15, please send your paper title, abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, and a brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum) to both organizers: Daniel Wallace Maze (danielwallacemazegmail.com) and Carolyn C. Wilson (cwilson68hotmail.com). If your research concerns more than one potential Bellini-related paper topic, you may submit an abstract for each.

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[2] Madonna Revisited: Sites of Invention, Innovation, and Competition

The Virgin and Child represents one of the most enduring visual themes in the history of Western art, and in Vasari and modern textbooks alike, the Renaissance begins with the Madonna. From Bellini and Leonardo to Michelangelo and Raphael, the early Cinquecento is one of the most fertile periods for innovative representations of this subject, and it follows that the Madonna served as a principal venue for contemporary artistic and religious debates. Citing the Madonna of the Rocks, Rona Goffen argued that images of the Virgin furnished one of the primary sites for artistic rivalry and competition in sixteenth-century Florence. Less considered, however, are the ways in which these examples attest to networks of discourse between artists, their patrons, and the broader religious communities that collected these devotional objects. We invite proposals that address the following questions: How did the Madonna become a chief arena for exchange among artists and patrons? What were the visual, theological, and political motors that inspired patterns of production? In what ways did these currents stimulate artistic response? What were the stakes of individual objects commissioned in this heady atmosphere? In this panel, we seek new and original contributions that reexamine images of the Madonna in the early sixteenth century and investigate related issues of imitation, innovation, and revision among artists and patrons.

Please send abstracts (no more than 150 words) and a short CV (300-word maximum) to Emily Fenichel (efenichelfau.edu) and Tracy Cosgriff (tcc4vtvirginia.edu) no later than 4 May 2015.