As RSA is heading to La Nouvelle Orléans, this panel aims to take stock
of two groundbreaking French art history texts currently celebrating,
respectively, their 40th and 30th anniversary. Louis Marin’s To Destroy
Painting and The Origin of Perspective by Hubert Damisch were both
translated into English and other languages, and had considerable
impact on art historical discussions around their topics.

The books address very different periods and questions – Damisch’s
objects are situated close to RSA’s earlier chronological limit,
whereas Marin’s study analyzes art from the last century of our
Society’s temporal spectrum. Both, however, invented methods and ways
of speaking about art that have been highly influential across early
modern art historical scholarship. And both originated in the same
scholarly milieu among whose heirs are prominent art historians such as
Daniel Arasse, Georges Didi-Huberman and Giovanni Careri, among many
others.

For this panel, we seek papers discussing one of these seminal books –
or indeed both together – and the legacy of Damisch’s and Marin’s
contributions to the discipline.

Please send abstracts (up to 150 words) and short biographical notes (no longer than 300 words) to Itay Sapir, sapir.itayuqam.ca, by May 29, 2017.