Call for Papers
Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Washington, D.C.
22-24 March 2012

Dialectics of Creation: Facture and Forethought, 1400-1650

Early modern and historiographic accounts of artistic creation have routinely privileged a non-experiential, abstract semantic field instantiated in concepts like idea, concetto and ingegno, which elide the manual articulation of artworks. Alternatively, a number of scholars have recently become invested in the act of making, that is, the processes of ideation and physical translation by which an object comes into being. In doing so, they have drawn attention to the question of how theory and practice engage the reciprocal relationship between mental conception and the physical manipulation of material. Along these lines, we propose to depart from a top-down model for the infusion of artistic inspiration in order to concentrate on how artists and beholders encountered various kinds of knowledge and modes of knowing through practice. Knowledge of the object, we maintain, is acquired, generated and transmitted through deliberative practice in the pursuit of naturalistic representation or poetic/non-figural truth. This critical paradigm appeals to the representational economy of numerous disciplines such as art, science, cartography, anatomy/physiology, theology, and philosophy. This session seeks submissions that examine instances of investigatory mimesis in which the interaction between intellectual understanding and practical skill broadens or critiques prescribed theories that undermine performance. This could include critical reappraisals of the dialogue between practiced and proscriptive theories of disegno, pictorial strategies that question naturalistic apprehension (i.e. macchie, serrated light, dissolving forms, etc.), the question of whether or not scientific illustrations transmit empirical knowledge and how this is or is not accomplished, the mental and technical exigencies of translating an idea conceived in one medium into another (painting into tapestry/prints, 2D plans into 3D objects/built environments, etc.), drawing in all of its permutations (pentimenti, etc.), the role of bozzetti in sculpture, marginal notations, etc. Please submit a 150 word abstract as well as a short CV to: Christopher Nygren, University of Pennsylvania (christopher.nygrengmail.com), Jason Di Resta, Johns Hopkins University (jdirest2jhu.edu), and Hana Gruendler, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (gruendlerkhi.fi.it) by May 23rd 2011.