Sketching prohibited! Military Interdictions of Drawing and Artistic Practice in Europe from Early Modern Times to the Twentieth Century

Thursday-Friday, November 5-6, 2015

Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut
Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin

Prohibitions of drawing topographies or architecture have rarely been a topic of art history or visual studies, although they can be accounted for in Europe since the 16th century. Such interdictions prove the power that was ascribed to on site-drawings of landscapes, cities, and fortifications. They were a widespread reaction to the production, collection and storage of maps and images of potential enemies’ terrains, and their objective was to prevent espionage. It can be assumed that these military restrictions of civilian artistic practices not only shaped the historic representations of land- and cityscapes and of architecture that still exist in collections and archives today, but that they also informed historic artistic practices of sketching and drawing on the spot.The colloquium sets out to investigate the effects of military interdictions of drawing through a series of case studies, proposing that such restrictions informed both the perception and the visual representations of landscapes, cities and buildings.

Thursday, November 5, 2015
Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin, Hörsaal B (ground floor)

17:30 Welcome and Introduction
Ulrike Boskamp/Sebastian Fitzner

18:00 Keynote Lecture
Ulrike Gehring (Trier), Sketched Knowledge: Epistemic Procedures of Mapping
Landscape around 1650

Friday, November 6, 2015
Venue: Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin, Room A 163 (1st floor)

9.15 Opening
Ulrike Boskamp/Sebastian Fitzner

9.30 Valeria Manfrè (Madrid), „Copy and Paste“. The Reuse of Visual Culture in Early Modern Urban Cartography

10.30 Amrei Buchholz (Hamburg/Berlin), Tracing El Dorado. Maps of Secret
Territories: Between Imagination and (Topographic) Projection

11.30 Coffee Break

12.00 Djoeke van Netten (Amsterdam), Publication Prohibited! Secret Drawings in the Dutch East India Company in the 17th Century

13.00–14.00 Lunch Break

14.00 Pedro Luengo Gutiérrez (Sevilla), Just War and Transcultural Dialogue. Dutch and Spanish Fortifications in Southeast Asia in the 18th Century

15.00 Simon Paulus (Stuttgart), A „Friendly Rivalry“? Some Notes on Studying the Art of Fortification in Practice around 1700

16.00 Coffee Break

16.30 Sean Willcock (London), Image-Making and Imperial Intervention in Nineteenth-Century South Asia

17.30 Ulrike Boskamp (Berlin), Mnemotechnics and the Trickery of Spies. Special Artists’ Strategies on the Frontlines of the Franco-Prussian War

18.30–19.00 Concluding Remarks and Final Discussion

Registration is recommended but not required.
The conference is generously supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft.

Concept and contact:
Ulrike Boskamp, DFG-Research Group 1703 „Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art“: ulrike.boskamp[at]fu-berlin.de
Sebastian Fitzner, Juniorprofessor für Architekturgeschichte und Architekturtheorie der Frühen Neuzeit in Europa und Amerika: sebastian.fitzner[at]fu-berlin.de