[1] The Role of Missionaries in Asian and American Artistic Interaction

Rachel Miller
rachel.millercsus.edu

This panel invites papers that address the role that Catholic missionaries played in facilitating artistic and cultural interaction between Europe and overseas contacts in Asia and the Americas, two sites of active missionary activity in the early modern period. In this panel, we will invite a conversation that focuses on how art moved through the global missionary network of the Catholic Church from Europe to the Americas and Asia. We are also interested in papers that demonstrate the role played by missionaries in facilitating direct cross-cultural interaction between Asia and the Americas. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited, to the following:

• The movement of artists and works of art as facilitated by missionaries
• The founding of missionary art schools and the exportation of students’ art works
• Missionaries as facilitators of intercontinental artistic commissions
• The transmission of architectural ideas through missionary building projects
• Missionaries’ involvement in the trade of art objects
• Artists who were members of missionary orders and were active in Asia and/or the Americas

Please submit your paper proposal by May 20 to Christa Irwin (irwinmarywood.edu) and Rachel Miller (Rachel.millercsus.edu). Proposals must include the following:
• Name, affiliation, email address
• Paper title
• Abstract (250-word maximum)
• Keywords
• CV (1 page)

------

[2] Worlding Early Modern France

Robert Wellington
robert.wellingtonanu.edu.au

Keywords: Material culture, the global turn, ancien-régime France, court culture, cross-cultural encounters, transcultural aesthetics.

Chair: Dr Robert Wellington (Australian National University)

The early modern age (1500-1700) was, perhaps, the first truly global period in human history. As many recent studies have shown, migration and global movement are not just modern phenomena. Indeed, scholars of early modern history, art and visual culture have cogently argued that studies of the historical movement of people, objects, and cultural ideas are vital to understanding and reconciling the myriad cultural perspectives of our own societies. The resistance to ‘globalisation’ in the academy—with its implicit cultural homogeneity—raises the question of how people, objects, images and ideas operate in communities that aspire to celebrate and maintain cultural diversity. Surveys that promise a ‘global’ or ‘world’ history run the risk of subsuming all cultures to a single simplistic narrative that fails to engage with the complex and varied epistemologies that are evident in different cultures. This has led scholars to call for a ‘worlding’ of history, to support pluralities of local, national and international discourse, to accommodate a variety of worldviews.

This session responds to this call, inviting proposals for papers that reveal complex networks of cultural exchange between France, her colonies, and other cultures in the early modern world. Papers that address this theme with a focus on the following issues are especially welcome: Embassies, emissaries and ambassadorial gifts to and from the French Court; the movement of people and things across international borders; the individual agents and bureaucratic mechanisms of that process; local and international trade networks; the complex ‘lives’ of objects as they move into new cultural contexts; centres and peripheries of power in the francophone world; and the cultural agency of slaves and occupied people in French colonies.

Proposals, to be submitted by email to robert.wellingtonanu.edu.au by Friday, May 27, must include the following:

• a paper title (15-word maximum)
• abstract (150-word maximum) abstract guidelines
• keywords
• a very brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum). Prose bios will not be accepted. CV guidelines and models
• first, middle, and last name; affiliation; and email address

------

[3] Assessing the Venetian Artists of the Sette Maniere

Maria Aresin
maria.aresingooglemail.com

As early as 1557 Ludovico Dolce foresaw the end of the great Venetian painting tradition that he believed had reached the apex of innovation and quality with the achievements of Titian. At the conclusion of Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura Aretino gives voice to this worry: “E di presente io temo, che la Pittura non torni a smarrirsi un’altra volta: percioche de’ giovani non si vede risorgere alcuno, che dia speranza di dover pervenire a qualche honesta eccelllenza…” Dolce’s proclamation of the end of what later became known as the golden period of Venetian Renaissance painting was also expressed by a number of writers after him, cementing the idea that subsequent to the deaths of Titian (1576), Veronese (1588) and Tintoretto (1594), Venetian painting fell into sharp decline.

The panel seeks to break with the rhetorical trope of the death or Crisis of the Venetian Renaissance Tradition (Rosand) by focusing on the group of seven artists active in the first half of the Seicento described by the art critic Marco Boschini in his Breve Instruzione of the 1674 edition of Le ricche minere:
“Da questi gran Maestri dell’Arte sono poi derivati infiniti Pittori di moltissima stima, ed in particolare ce ne sono al numero di sette, che hanno osservate le pedate di tre, cioè di Tiziano, del Tintoretto e di Paolo Veronese, e per questa cagione tengono molta simpatia fra di loro. Il Primo è Giacomo Palma il Giovine (così chiamato a distinzione del Vecchio); il secondo Leonardo Corona da Murano; il terzo Andrea Vicentino; il quarto Santo Peranda; il quinto Antonio Aliense; il sesto Pietro Malombra; il settimo Girolamo Pilotto. Molte volte, chi non è pratico del loro operare non è così pronto a farne di essi la distinzione.”
Almost completely neglected by art history, Boschini coined the term Sette Maniere for these painters, grouping these individuals together due to the fact that their works were very difficult to distinguish from one another.

The panel will consider counter-arguments to the accepted judgment of the abrupt end of the Venetian painting legacy at the end of the Cinquecento, and seeks to instead promote the idea of a continuity in the Venetian tradition in the Seicento. By focusing on the understudied, yet prolific group of artists of the Sette Maniere, we wish to shed new light on the artistic contributions they made to Venetian painting in the seventeenth century. This panel will also pose questions relating to the domination of the production of paintings in Venice by these artists in the Seicento, as well as considering artistic quality as the basis for art historical study. To put it bluntly, despite their ubiquity in Venice, have Palma il Giovane and his contemporaries been underrated, or are they simply not very good artists?

Papers can address topics such as:

- The life and works of each of the Sette Maniere artists: Palma il Giovane, Leonardo Corona, Andrea Vicentino, Sante Peranda, Antonio Vassilacchi (l’Aliense), Pietro Malombra and Girolamo Pilotto
- The Sette Maniere artists as collectors
- The Sette Maniere artists and the workshop
- The Sette Maniere artists within the landscape of the Seconda Accademia Veneziana (founded 1593)
- The Sette Maniere artists and the stylistic legacies of Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian
- Counter-arguments to the art historical trope of the crisis in the Venetian tradition
- New archival documents on any of the seven artists

Please send an abstract (max. 150 words) and a short CV (max. 300 words) in a single PDF to M.Lillywhite.1warwick.ac.uk and maria.aresingooglemail.com by May 25, 2017.

------

[4] Vision Askew: Anamorphosis, Catoptrics, and Dioptrics in Early Modern Art

Justina Spencer
justinahspencergmail.com

In the early modern era the methods of perspective were successfully applied beyond classic two-dimensional paintings in the form of anamorphic murals, three-dimensional peepboxes, conical mirrors, and crystalline telescopes. Such optical illusions often disguised clever political allegories, obfuscated erotic titillations, or functioned as pedagogical puzzles, as they were contingent on the knowledge audiences brought to the works. This session seeks to explore the production, collection, and circulation of material objects that skew vision with the aim of understanding how such art forms reify contemporaneous theory and cultural attitudes. Whether mirrored, refracted, or anamorphically skewed, what do optical illusions reveal about early modern perception or imagination? How do such art forms converse with optical or mathematical theory? Do they reveal distinct religious or political attitudes in the form of covert satire? Ultimately, this panel aims to uncover how illusions functioned as pedagogical mechanisms by exploring the visual punchlines hidden in their makeup.

Topics may include (but are not limited to): the role of illusion in the study of optics; deceptive entertainments in early modern courts and Kunstkammern; embodied perception; anamorphosis as political or religious allegory; illusion as play or method of instruction.

Proposals addressing any geographical area are welcome.

Please send a paper title (15 word maximum), abstract (150 word maximum), keywords, and a brief curriculum vitae (one page) to Justina Spencer: jspenceruottawa.ca by May 30, 2017.

------

[5] Virtue and Wonder: Magnificent Architecture in the Early Modern Period

Nele De Raedt
nele.deraedtugent.be

This session explores the transformations and adaptations of the classical notion of magnificence in the early modern period. Scholarly literature about magnificence and its role in architectural patronage has focused almost exclusively on "Magnificentia" as an Aristotelian virtue. Yet, the early modern discourses on magnificent architecture knew other traditions as well, regarding magnificence as a characteristic of the object (associated with wonder and luxury). In light of religious and political arguments, as well as aesthetic theories, lavish expenditure on buildings was associated with distinct and specific notions of "Magnificence." On the one hand, these discourses continued to rely on "Magnificentia" as the virtuous act of patronage discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. On the other hand, the political and religious adaptation of the discourse took an object-centered view, based upon effects of wonder and awe provoked by the magnificent building on its onlooker.

In this session, we invite contributions that explore the existence of distinct and sometimes contradictory notions of magnificence in the early modern period. We are particularly interested in understanding how and in what circumstances these different notions were implemented to defend and celebrate architectural patronage, and whether authors consciously turned to certain traditions, while ignoring others. Similarly, we would like to trace when and how magnificence was used as an aesthetic category, and what religious or political attributes were ascribed to magnificent buildings by patrons and architects.
Please submit proposals for 20-minute papers to the organizers Nele De Raedt (nele.deraedtugent.be) and Anne-Françoise Morel (annefrancoise.morelkuleuven.be) by 30 may 2017. Please include:

- Title (max 15 words)
- Abstract (max 150 words)
- A short biographical statement (max 250 words)
- Author’s name, professional affiliation, and contact information.

This session is sponsored by the European Architectural History Network.

------

[6] Elemental Force

Thalia Allington-Wood
thalia.allington-wooducl.ac.uk
 
Drowning, falling, floating, growing, burning, melting. How are elements figured in Renaissance and early modern artistic representation? From imagery of earth, water, air and fire, to the more ubiquitous sense of temperature, weight, darkness and light, how does visual culture contribute to an understanding of the elements in this period? From the thrusting up of rocks from beneath the earth through volcanoes and earthquakes, to the wide expanse of the cosmos, knowledge of natural phenomena was prominent in the Renaissance and early modern imagination. How do objects harness the elements in their production? What, for example, is the role of fire and earth in metal works and ceramics? Equally, how did elemental forces act upon and alter works of art – from physical damage to the influence of regional topographies, materials and pigments?

The landscape of elemental physics changed dramatically between 1300 and 1700. This history is characterised by a broad paradigm shift from a sublunar, terrestrial world made up of the four elements and their specific material attributes (hot, cold, heavy, light), to a globe experienced through Mercator’s seas, Galileo’s sky and Newton’s earth. Yet the elements, their effects upon the body, their power to manifest material things – and how they are imagined and contested in visual culture – do not always sit easily within this chronology. The representation of these forces is the focus of this panel. It is a subject that has the power to open up broader concerns regarding memory, motion, travel, sensory experience, metamorphosis, environmentalism and networks of knowledge exchange – social, cultural and political.

We welcome papers from across disciplines, from within Europe and beyond Western contexts. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

- The elements and their early modern properties: Earth/ Rock, Water, Air, Fire; hot, cold, wet, dry, heavy, light.
- Elements as complex, compound mixtures.
- Materiality & Making: sculpture and stone, ceramics and glass, metal and fire, water and fountains, earth and pigments.
- Elemental/ material states: solid, liquid and in-between.
- The effects of the elements upon the body: falling, burning, pain, joy, drowning, disease, phenomenological and sensory approaches to elemental force.
- Understanding within academic disciplines: natural philosophy, alchemy, chemistry, theories of metamorphosis.
- Cosmos: stars, sky, separation of celestial and terrestrial physics.
- Gravity.
- Light & Shadow.
- Manifestations of the elements in nature: wind, clouds, volcanoes, rivers, the sea, mountains, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, storms.
- Connections to landscape, geography, environmentalism, catastrophism, the non-human.
- Water & Travel: wetscapes, navigation and shipwreck, hydrographies.

Please send a paper title, abstract (150 word maximum), keywords, and a brief curriculum vitae (300 word maximum – see RSA guidelines for requirements) to thalia.allington-wooducl.ac.uk and sophie.morrisucl.ac.uk by 31 May 2017

------

[7] Ut pictura medicina? Relations and Analogies between Medicine and the Visual Arts

Fabian Jonietz
fabian.jonietzkhi.fi.it

Beyond the traditional nexus of art, anatomy, and optics, Early Modern sources often suggest a broader, more complex interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge between art and medicine: Lorenzo Ghiberti, for example, recommended that artists know "medicine" in addition to "anatomy." One level of the relationship concerned both disciplines’ need to grasp the particularity of a given body in light of the universal. Physicians thus sought artists to produce color scales for use in diagnosis, just as artists utilized medical knowledge to sharpen their visual judgment. Another level concerned broader historical circumstances. Not only did artists and physicians share Saint Luke as a common patron; in Renaissance Florence, for example, they also belonged to the same guild, engaged in similar debates regarding their "liberal" status, and – arguably – conceived their histories in similar ways. What can we conclude about such multivalent relationships? For example, did the two disciplines’ commitment to the observation of particular phenomena engender inconsistencies with traditional doctrine that demanded a similar reckoning with status, authority, and history?

This panel investigates the relationship between medicine and art at all levels: the social position of practitioners, the exchange of theoretical and practical knowledge, the existence of shared nomenclature and concepts, and the latter’s tendency to generate shared modes of observation and description.

Please submit a title, abstract (150 words maximum) and a short CV (300 words) to the panel organizers Robert Brennan (robert.brennankhi.fi.it) and Fabian Jonietz (fabian.jonietzkhi.fi.it) by May 30.

------

[8] Worlding the Early Modern: Case Studies in Visual and Material Culture

Tomasz Grusiecki
tomasz.grusieckimail.mcgill.ca

Initiated by the Making Worlds Project (https://www.makingworlds.net), which investigates recent questions posed by the global turn in the humanities (including art history, literature, anthropology and history), this panel seeks papers that engage with the representational and conceptual ways in which the world was conceived, imagined and inscribed between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through representing, collecting, utopian writing, map-making, trading, encountering and describing the world, early modern artists, traders, writers and natural philosophers were in fact bringing the world nearer to them. Taking cue from Martin Heidegger’s concept of worlding as an ontological process of bringing-near—or thinging—the world, which is always both pre-existing and historically contingent, we are interested in gaining a more nuanced understanding of what the world meant epistemologically, philosophically, geographically, technologically and cosmologically in the longue durée of the early modern period. In particular, we want to explore how things, such as objects, texts, and works of artistic and visual culture, mediated and participated in world-making.

We invite papers that take up different case studies which engage with material and visual representations of the world, including those that attend to how and why in its making such conceptualizations were either totalizing, flawed, or even impossible. Please send your 150-word abstracts, with a title, keywords, and a 300-word CV to Tomasz Grusiecki (tomasz.grusieckimail.mcgill.ca) and Ivana Vranic (ivana7vranicgmail.com) by May 30, 2017.

------

[9] Art as Idea in the Early Modern World

Marije Osnabrugge and Elsje van Kessel
ejmvkst-andrews.ac.uk

In the early modern period, artistic ideas circulated on an unprecedented scale: locally, (inter)nationally, and globally. Indeed, these circulations were among the main factors in the great fecundity of the arts during this period. This panel seeks to define the nature of artistic ideas and examine how they travelled, from the perspective of three key players: people, art objects, and texts. We are explicitly interested in circulations on any scale and without geographical boundaries: within Europe, between Europe and its (proto-) colonies, and within any other region, in the belief that the discussion will benefit from the input of researchers from different research traditions.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Ideas of art and their circulation and transformation
- The role of art literature in this process (art theory, criticism, travelogues, diaries, print culture, etc.)
- Artefacts as material embodiments of ideas
- Regional, national and (inter)continental networks
- Methodological and theoretical reflections on the study of circulations, including cultural exchange, histoires croisées, assimilation, hybridity, mestizaje.


Submission guidelines

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include:
- Preliminary paper title
- Abstract of 150 words
- Keywords
- Curriculum vitae of 300 words, including full name, current affiliation, and email address

Please send your submission to Marije Osnabrugge (marije.osnabruggeuniv-montp3.fr) and Elsje van Kessel (ejmvkst-andrews.ac.uk) by 25 May 2017, using the subject line ‘RSA 2018’. Applicants will be notified by 5 June.

tags: artistic ideas, circulation, mobility, art literature, methodology, networks, cultural exchange, hybridity.

------

[10] Phenomenology and Early Modern Cartography

Mark Rosen
mxr088000utdallas.edu

The study of early modern cartography has gone through several phases. At first, maps were often read as fairly neutral documents, placed in alignment with other technologies in a positivistic framework aiming toward ever-increasing accuracy. Experts in cartography were often collectors with great knowledge of the printing and publishing fields who exerted connoisseurial skill in assigning dates and workshops to individual maps. A second movement, following poststructuralist developments in the humanities, began to read maps as texts, rethinking their vocabulary and addressing the dynamics of power and authority implicit in them.

Now that a generation of cartographic studies have followed upon the heels of post-structuralism, it is time to ask where the study of early modern maps is next headed. A potential third avenue explores a phenomenological approach, investigating how sensory perceptions augment—or conflict with—the mapping of cities/territories by individual cartographers and the reading, buying, carrying, displaying, and treatment of maps by purchasers or users.

We seek papers that deal with individual responses to maps that help us better understand the way their makers and users interacted with them, as well as how they may have been read against their intentions by particular users. Questions these papers might consider include (but are not limited to): How did the use of surveying instruments augment or replace visual apprehension? How accurately could conventions of scale be read by viewers? Did some purchasers read maps differently than others? How did artist-engineers discuss the practice of surveying (the field assessment) and the production of maps (the picturing)? How did maps allude to—or not—the use of optical devices and measuring instruments? How easy was it to interpret a map in the field?

Proposals addressing any geographic area are welcome.

Please send an abstract (150-word maximum), paper title (15-word maximum) and a brief CV (300-word maximum) to Leslie Geddes (Tulane University) and Mark Rosen (University of Texas at Dallas) at lgeddes1tulane.edu and mxr088000utdallas.edu by May 30, 2017.

------

[11] Grotesque heads in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy

Rebecca Norris
rebeccamnorrisgmail.com

Although the history of caricatured heads can be traced back to Antiquity, as an independent genre, depictions of strange, fantastic, comical and repulsive heads arguably stem from the influence of Leonardo Da Vinci’s systematic and experimental teste caricate, which soon became widely known and copied. Less programmatically Michelangelo too experimented with the genre, both in quick sketches and more complete works. Later exponents of the genre, each of whom contributed his own vision to its development, were Annibale Carracci, Ribera, Guercino, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and, later, Carlo Maratti and Pier Leone Ghezzi, all of whom produced substantial bodies of graphic caricature.

This session seeks to explore the development of the grotesque head as an early modern genre and later influences. Participants are encouraged to put
forward original readings of grotesque heads as depicted in drawings, paintings and prints, as well as those found in single and group portraits, and series. We hope to approach the subject from many angles and would welcome analyses of processes ranging from the ‘doodle’ to highly finished works; and discussions of the subject as a reflection of the human condition from socio-political stances, as well as the interaction between caricature and audience.

Please send proposals to Rebecca Norris rebeccamnorriscantab.net and Lucia Tantardini lt303cam.ac.uk by Wednesday, 31 May 2017.

As per RSA guidelines, proposals must include the following:
paper title (15-word maximum), abstract (150-word maximum), keywords, and a very brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum).
See http://www.rsa.org/general/custom.asp?page=2018NOLA