Conference: The Printed Image within a Culture of Print:
Prints, publishing and the early modern arts in Europe, 1450-1700

April 9, 2011. Research Forum, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

Organizers: Dr. Sheila McTighe, Senior Lecturer
Emily Gray and Anita Sganzerla, PhD candidates
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

For details about tickets and attending the conference, contact researchforumcourtauld.ac.uk

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, the advent of print utterly changed the production of images. A repertoire of images of all kinds, from the crudest woodcut to the most virtuosic engraving, from broadsides of wonders and prodigies to pictures reproducing famous paintings and sculptures, was put into the hands of both image-makers and consumers of images. New possibilities for allusion and intertextuality came into being thanks to this bridge between the image and its publics. And the publication of printed images, a commercial venture, widened the spectrum of those who bought images, producing new kinds of viewers and readers.

This one-day conference focuses on the relations between print culture and the visual arts as a whole, looking not only at the artist’s print as produced by the peintre-graveur, but at the relations between the entire spectrum of print and what we think of now as ‘fine art’.

Since the 1990s when the studies of Roger Chartier inspired work across many historical disciplines, much has been claimed for the impact of printed media on social, intellectual and cultural life in early modernity. The study of popular culture, the history of mentalités, book history and reception studies across a diverse range of periods and cultures have all profited from opening up the area known loosely as print culture. Art historical studies, however, have not often referred to this body of research. Bringing together some of the disciplines that study print culture to focus on the image and the printed text opens up new questions of concern to historians and literary historians as well as to students of the art print.

The Printed Image within a Culture of Print: Prints, Publishing and the Early Modern Arts in Europe, 1450-1700

PROGRAMME

9.30 – 10.00
Registration

10.00 – 10.15
Introduction – Sheila McTighe (Courtauld Institute of Art)

Session 1: Prints and Political Culture

10.15 – 10.35
Fanny Lambert (Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris): Ceremonies in Print

10.35 – 10.55
Gary Rivett (Sheffield University): Engravings of Charles I, Cheap Print and Politics in Early Restoration England

10.55 – 11.15
Helen Pierce (Aberdeen University): Playing for Laughs? Cards, Cartoons and Controversy During the Exclusion Crisis

11.15 – 11.30
Discussion

11.30 – 12.00
COFFEE/TEA BREAK (Tea/coffee provided)

Session 2: Prints and the Culture of Exchange

12.00 – 12.20
Femke Speelberg (Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History): The Printed Image as Lingua Franca: the Case of Fontainebleau

12.20 – 12.40
Joris Van Grieken (Royal Library of Belgium): ‘Om ’t volckx wille’ (‘For the People’s Sake’) Hieronymus Cock and the Marketing of Printed Images

12.40 – 13.00
Robert L. Fucci (Columbia University): Jan van de Velde's Vanishing Gentry: Plate Manipulation in an Early Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Etching

13.00 – 13.20
Stephanie S. Dickey (Queen’s University, Kingston): Publication, Inscription and the Transformation of Meaning

13.20 – 13.40
Discussion

13.40 – 14.40
BREAK FOR LUNCH (lunch not provided)

Session 3: Prints and Intellectual Culture, Part I - Chair: Sheila McTighe (Courtauld Institute of Art)

14.40 – 15.00
Marisa Bass (Harvard University): Borrowed Love: A “Caritas” Woodcut in a Humanist Manuscript

15.00 – 15.20
Christophe Brouard (Université Paris I - Panthéon Sorbonne): Portraying Renaissance Rurality in Venice during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century

15.20 – 15.30
Discussion

15.30 – 15.40
Short Break

Session 4: Prints and Intellectual Culture, Part II - Chair: Sheila McTighe (Courtauld Institute of Art)

15.40 – 16.00
Susanna Berger (Cambridge University): Illustrated Broadsides and the Performance of Natural Philosophy: A Study of Printed Images Within Early-Modern Academic and Ceremonial Contexts

16.00 – 16.20
Paris Amanda Spies-Gans (Getty Institute/Independent scholar): Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678): Self-Portraiture, Humanist Portrait Exchange, Women in Print (Title tbc)

16.20 – 16.40
Anita V. Sganzerla (Courtauld Institute of Art): Stefano Della Bella’s 'Hand-Screen with Picture Puzzles on the Themes of Love and Fortune' and Early Modern Print Culture in Florence

16.40 – 16.55
Discussion

16.55 – 17.15
COFFEE/TEA BREAK (Tea/coffee provided)

Session 5: Print Culture and the Painter - Chair: Emily Gray (Courtauld Institute of Art)

17.15 – 17.35
Matthias Wivel (Cambridge University): Titian and the Printed Vernacular, c. 1514-1530

17.35 – 17.55
Todd P. Olson (University of California, Berkeley): Net of Irrationality: Decay in Early Modern Prints

17.55 – 18.05
Reception