[1] Imagining the Heretic: Visual Narratives
From: Lara Langer <l-langernga.gov>
Date: Mar 29, 2017

Religious and social strife in the Early Modern period gave rise to a host of “heretics,” including significant thinkers like Girolamo Savonarola, Martin Luther, Tommaso Campanella, or Giordano Bruno, and commoners who were publicly accused for heretical acts. Artists were also sometimes suspected for adopting heretical views. Furthermore, the religious reshaping of Europe led to massive groups of people being indiscriminately labelled “heretics” according to faith despite instances of nicodemism. While the famous cases got reasonable exposure, the lesser known examples could serve to further understand this widespread and multifaceted “geography of the heretic” in Early Modern Europe. This panel is interested in primarily the process of historicizing, memorializing, and imagining the heretic, and not exclusively iconoclastic issues. We invite discussions of how images of individuals denounced as heretics stood as powerful statements of the heretic’s undeniable deviation from orthodoxy. Papers may address a variety of issues on the heretic in art: What made one a heretic considering that, at the same time, those labelled as such could be equally celebrated as prophets by their supporters? What does art tell us about the life, death, and burial practices of a heretic? How was a heretic different from an “infidel”? How could a heretic navigate the tensions between group and individual identity? How was the European notion of “heretic” contextualized beyond its borders? What was the impact of the Inquisition on art? We also welcome discussions on a variety of media, including tombs, portraiture, and works on paper.

Please send an abstract of 250 words max and a brief CV of 300 words max to Silvia Tita at s-titanga.gov and to Lara Langer at l-langernga.gov by April 13, 2017.

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[2] Revisiting Raphael's Vatican Stanze: Papal Power and Artistic Agency in Sixteenth-Century Rome

From: Tracy Cosgriff <tcosgrifhamilton.edu>
Date: Mar 31, 2017

Panel Organizers: Kim Butler Wingfield, American University, Washington D.C. (butleramerican.edu) and Tracy Cosgriff, Hamilton College (tcosgrifhamilton.edu)
The upcoming quincentennial of Raphael’s death is an auspicious opportunity to reappraise the painter's famous frescoes in the suite of papal apartments today known as the Vatican Stanze. We invite papers that offer new interpretations of these canonical works, painted by the artist and his workshop between 1508 and 1524: the Stanza della Segnatura, the Stanza di Eliodoro, the Stanza dell'Incendio, and the Sala di Costantino. These might address questions of: translation and mediation (iconographies, ideologies, semiotics of text-image relationships); collaboration and agency (between and of the master, his workshop, patrons, and humanist advisors); space (real and imagined ritual function, experience of spectatorship); process (technique, style, materials); transitions and boundaries (between rooms, papal patrons, before and after Raphael’s death, secular and sacred, Medieval subject matter and Renaissance form, and represented temporalities); and the status of images (in the context of art theory, humanism, as well as Catholic and Protestant Reform debates).

The panel is sponsored by the Italian Art Society.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short CV to Kim Butler Wingfield (butleramerican.edu) and Tracy Cosgriff (tcosgrifhamilton.edu) by April 13.