Call for Papers, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 22-24 March 2012

Michelangelo in the Seventeenth Century

While Michelangelo’s impact on the artistic culture of sixteenth-century Italy has remained a fruitful area of investigation in recent art historical scholarship, his continuing presence as an ambivalent yet catalyzing force in seventeenth-century art and art writing is relatively underexplored. The prevailing view of the artist’s reception in the seventeenth century delineates an apparent dichotomy between high-profile episodes of artistic engagement with Michelangelo (for instance, in the works and self-fashioning of Caravaggio, Rubens, Bernini, and Borromini) and his precipitously declining fortunes in art criticism and academic theory, in which Raphael and the antique were established as the preferred models for contemporary artistic practice. This panel seeks papers that probe and nuance this understanding through case studies that illumine specific dynamics at work in Michelangelo’s seventeenth-century reception, either in Italy or abroad. How did Michelangelo’s art and identity shape seventeenth-century artists, architects, art writers, and their works? And conversely, how did period engagements with Michelangelo serve to refashion the artist and his works, making them more or less relevant to the new century? Possible topics might include: instances of artistic homage to and/or parody of Michelangelo; Michelangelo as cultural commodity; period modifications to and/or restagings of Michelangelo’s works; regional encounters with Michelangelo; and artistic and literary efforts to reframe Michelangelo’s religious art in the wake of later sixteenth-century controversies.

Please e-mail a 150 word abstract of your paper, contact information, and affiliation to BOTH panel co-organizers by May 15, 2011: Carolina Mangone, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, C-MangoneNGA.gov and Estelle Lingo, University of Washington, Seattle, elingouw.edu.