Session: European artists and Renaissance Italian Architecture (1527-1800)

At the: 72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Session Chairs: Alessandro Brodini, Università degli Studi di Firenze, and Francesca Mattei, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

The Sack of Rome was pivotal event in the dissemination of Renaissance art toward other Italian cities. In the following decades this phenomenon continued on a European scale, advanced by the contributions of artists, humanists, collectors and antiquarians. Italian art spread into Europe through treatises and engravings, as the travels of sovereigns and artists allowed knowledge of works built in several Italian centers to circulate. The collecting of drawings constitutes one more means to disseminate Italian art.

The session wishes to focus on the relation between European architecture and Italian Renaissance. Its principal aim is to investigate the means, motivations, and functions with which European artists and architects looked toward Italy.
A second focus of the session is to analyze the potential outcomes of studies in European architecture, by examining the blending and interweaving of “all’antica” architecture that architects saw in Italy, and local vernacular styles typical of their countries to produce a new language.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Which centres and which buildings did the artists prefer?
- Did they approach monuments by direct examination or through some graphic medium, such as prints, treatises, and drawings made by other artists?
- Which other non-graphic media, such as written sources, help the dissemination of Italian architecture? Which categories of drawings are realised? Technical drawings, drawings of landscape, drawings of ruins?
- What roles did patronage play? And what was the role of humanists, men of letters or collectors?
- Which were the outcomes of these studies? Which buildings were built by using Italian architectural examples?

We encourage proposals that concentrate on the period spanning the Sack of Rome and the end of the 18th Century. Papers addressing all geographic areas and all perspectives and methodologies are welcome.

The 72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians will take place on April 24-28, 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. Applicants will submit a 300-word abstract and CV through the online portal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Please do not send these materials directly to the panel co-chairs. Submission of proposals to the SAH online portal closes at 11:59 on June 5, 2018.