[1] Framing: Between Transience and Permanence

From: Leah R. Clark <leah.clarkgmail.com>
Date: 04.05.2016
Deadline: 25.05.2016

Framing: Between Transience and Permanence
Renaissance Society of America 2017
Chicago, The Palmer House Hilton, 30 March–1 April 2017
http://rsa.site-ym.com/blogpost/1357869/245464/Framing-Between-Transience-and-Permanence

Recent interests in the mobility of objects have shed light on how objects circulated in the early modern period across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. It was through such circulation that objects could accrue different forms of value and meaning.
This session will be attentive to the relationship between transience and permanence by pursuing the notion of the ‘frame’ broadly defined. Papers might address one or more of the following questions:
How did framing arrest in time mobile objects? How did framing transform something perceived to be foreign into something local? How was framing linked to a sense of ownership? How is framing related to concepts such as translation or hybridity?
Papers that address a cross-cultural theme will be particularly welcome, as well as those that engage with theoretical debates.
Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Mounts as frames (for example metallic mounts of ceramics, ostrich eggs, bezoar stones)
- The use of insignia or initials as framing devices
- The context of a collection as framing
- The use of actual frames
- Ornament as frame
- Books as frames

Please send proposals to Leah R. Clark (the Open University, UK): leah.clarkopen.ac.uk Include in your proposal: name and affiliation, paper title, abstract (max. 150 words), and a brief CV.
Email proposals as soon as possible, but no later than May 20, 2016.
For more information on the RSA 2017 conference see: http://rsa.site-ym.com/page/2017Chicago

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[2] Digital Humanities

From: Angela Dressen <adressenitatti.harvard.edu>
Date: 06.05.2016
Deadline: 25.05.2016

As the discipline representative for Digital Humanities at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) I am looking for qualified papers on topics related to Digital Humanities projects. I am especially interested in the following topics

- Between online exhibition and research tool: trends in online exhibitions beyond the display
- New trends in manuscript databases and research tools – visualization and interactivity
- Digital Publishing – new formats, old formats and their future
- Digital Humanities and Art History

Proposals in these areas are especially welcome, but I am also open for any other single or panel suggestion.
Please send your inquiries and proposals (until May 25, 2016) to

Angela Dressen
adressenitatti.harvard.edu

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[3] Beyond Renaissance Binaries

From: Lorenzo Buonanno <lorenzo.buonannoumb.edu>
Date: 07.05.2016
Deadline: 01.06.2016

Among the many legacies bestowed upon art historical studies by Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is his codification of agonistic aesthetic concepts through binary frameworks. The continued significance of, for example, the dialectic disegno and colorito to art theory was likely due in part to the richness of these terms and their ability to suggest numerous affiliated metaphorical pairs, including but not limited to: intellectual/emotional, difficult/pleasurable, masculine/feminine, ideation/execution, and form/matter. Concomitantly, many of these conceptual oppositions were mapped onto the very geographies of the Renaissance world, making the political dynamics between both smaller polities—such as Venice and Florence—and broader regions—North and South of the Alps—an integral component of these defining frameworks. This panel seeks to question such critical dichotomies, exploring not only new cross-correspondences between these binaries, but also points of disjunction and tension as productive sites in their own right. In addition to the above-mentioned concepts, papers might also address notions of materiality/illusionism, foreground/background, icon/narrative, high/low, fine/decorative arts.

Please send abstracts (no more than 150 words) and CV by June 1st to Jessica Maratsos, Assistant Professor, American University of Paris (jam2195columbia.edu); and to Lorenzo Buonanno, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston (lorenzo.buonannoumb.edu).

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[4] Medici Materials: from substance to artefact

From: Elinor Myara Kelif <elinorkelifgmail.com>
Date: 07.05.2016
Deadline: 30.05.2016

Nowhere was the Medici effort to combine nature, art and science more perceptible than in their awareness to materials. In fact, not only did the Medici show particular interest in art objects and rare artefacts, quickly becoming celebrated collectors from the Quattrocento onwards, but also did they cultivate from an early date a very particular peculiar passion to substances and their origin. This erudite interest lasted for three centuries, as generations of family members continuously enriched the Medici collections, and vigorously perused their effort for obtaining, producing and investigating materials both common and rare.

This passion took numerous forms: collecting both naturalia and artificialia; paying special attention to the extraction of Tuscan natural treasures and their mise-en-valeur through industry and art; studying and practicing alchemy; the decision of Cosimo I to place the Fonderia medicea inside the Palazzo Vecchio; the foundation by Ferdinando I of the Galleria dei lavori inside the Uffizi gallery. These are only few indications of the crucial place of materials in the eyes of the Medici.

Numerous artistic commissions executed for the Medici highlight this strong interest. From the diverse supports chosen for paintings to the continuous pursuit of new techniques in order to use and display diverse materials as part of precious art objects, the question of substances and materiality played a major role in the medicean artistic production. The quest for rarity, preciosity but also quality and supposed powers of certain chemical elements are essential parameters to be considered while evaluating the role of materials in the art commissioned by the Medici.

In this context, it is worth reexamining the relation between art and nature, as reflected in the manifest interest of the Medici in natural materials and chemical elements. What where the procedures that permitted the transformation of such materials into works of art? To which extant did the new methods of extraction and processing of such materials influence the production of art objects? How were particular substances and materials described in contemporary writing? How did the rarity or the supposed powers of materials influence their use? Was the classification process visible not only in the display of the collections but also within certain works of art? To which extent did the toscanità of certain materials dictate their use by the Medici and their artists?

Interested participants should send proposals, of no more than 150 words, keywords, and a single page CV, no longer than 300 words, to Antonella Fenech Kroke, Elinor Myara Kelif, and Sefy Hendler (medicimaterialsgmail.com).
Deadline 30 May the latest.

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[5] No, but Seriously. The Art and Afterlife of Erasmian Humor

From: Marisa Bass <mbasswustl.edu>
Date: 08.05.2016
Deadline: 28.05.2016

Erasmus’s Moriae encomium (Praise of Folly) has become a cultural monument: something more admired and acknowledged than actively understood. Yet as Erasmus’s protagonist herself would warn, deluded wisdom is the quintessence of folly.

The art and afterlife of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly remains very much to be explored, and goes far beyond Holbein’s famous marginal illustrations to the text. Folly’s condemnations of material devotion and the cult of images, her pointed critique of professional status, and her inversion of received ideas about everything from hunting to government, ecclesiastical politics to sexual desire—all these topoi find trans-European parallels in the works of artists, poets, playwrights, educationalists, and moral theorists well into the seventeenth century. Just as important is the model of Erasmian irony itself, something by no means confined to the newly reinvigorated traditions of paradoxical encomium: laughter becomes a tool with which the deluded absurdity of human self-regard (be it pious or noble) can at once be censured and embraced.

This session invites papers that query visual and literary responses not just to the subjects that are the targets of Folly’s sermon but also, and perhaps still more crucially, to the tactics of social, cultural, and intellectual commentary that Erasmus innovated at the dawn of the most turbulent and transformative century of the early modern period.

Proposals are welcome from scholars working in the histories of art, literature, and ideas—and of culture in the round.

Please send to the session organizers, Marisa Bass (mbasswustl.edu) and Rhodri Lewis (rhodri.lewisell.ox.ac.uk), a proposal that includes: a) your name and affiliation, b) your paper title c) an abstract (max 300 words), and d) a brief CV (max 300, formatted in list/bullet-point form) on or before the deadline of Saturday, May 28, 2016. Invitations to participate in the session will be sent by May 30, with a final confirmation of participation requested by June 3.

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[6] Beyond Baronio: New Assessments of the PaleoChristian Revival in Early Modernity

From: Jasmine Cloud <clouducmo.edu>
Date: 08.05.2016
Deadline: 29.05.2016

The so-called PaleoChristian Revival that transpired in Rome during the second half of the sixteenth century is broadly understood to have encompassed several phenomena, including but not limited to a renewed emphasis on the cult of saints and an attendant veneration of their relics; a heightened exploration of Rome’s sacred topography, particularly the catacombs; restoration of early Christian churches and other sites; and art inspired by both the iconography and style of earlier images. As the Revival has become a standardized feature in literature on the period, with Cardinal Cesare Baronio as its main protagonist, other aspects of the Revival await further investigation. This panel seeks papers that examine these commonly held tenets of the Revival, to further elucidate its nature and Baronio’s role, as well as papers that challenge these received notions. We welcome proposals that consider the following issues:

-The display of saint's bodies and associated monuments and imagery
-The intersection of early Christianity spirituality and the antique
-The revival of early Christian religious practice
-The role of printed material in disseminating revivalist thought
-Pilgrimage, sacred topography, site specificity
-The diffusion of the Revival throughout the rest of Italy and beyond

Please send a CV (max 300 words), an abstract (150 words), and keywords to Jasmine Cloud (clouducmo.edu) and Jeffrey Fraiman (jeff.fraimangmail.com) by May 29, 2016.