[1] New Approaches to Drawing and Draftmanship in the Early Modern Period

From: Andaleeb Badiee Banta
Date: 1 July 2019

Panel Organizers:
Andaleeb Badiee Banta (abantaartbma.org)
Jill Pederson (pedersonjarcadia.edu)

This session aims to revisit our broad understanding of the purpose of and technologies involved in drawing in the Renaissance and Baroque. Traditionally, early modern drawing has been approached with an eye toward attribution and connoisseurship. While these methodologies remain fundamental, recent exhibitions on Leonardo, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Watteau, and others have introduced exciting new ways of thinking about drawing as a means of education, exchange, and experimentation. We welcome papers on any aspect of early modern drawing ca. 1400-1750, including its technique, multiple functions, exchange, collaboration, copying, and use in workshop practice. In particular, we seek papers that problematize issues of authorship and move beyond monographic approaches to offer new insights into the production, implementation, circulation, and reception of drawings, as well as current research elucidated by the technical analysis of drawings. Papers that address drawing outside of Italy during this period, explore international relationships, and consider marginalized artists are strongly encouraged.

Please send a title (15-word maximum), an abstract (150-word maximum) and a short curriculum vitae (including full name, current affiliation, and email address) to Andaleeb Badiee Banta (abantaartbma.org) and Jill Pederson (pedersonjarcadia.edu) by July 26, 2019.

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[2] Body, Brain, Heart: Memory in Early Modern European Art

From: Rebecca M. Howard
Date: 1 July 2019

Panel Organizer:
Dr. Rebecca M. Howard, Department of Art, University of Memphis

This panel seeks to address the question of memory as it appears in the art of early modernity. Memory, mnemonics, preservation, and commemoration receive increasingly greater attention during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. In addition, scientific and pseudo-scientific studies of the roles of the brain, heart, and body in terms of the process of memory find new growth, altering perceptions of memory in both the sacred and secular realms.

This panel will consider the myriad ways that artistic practice in early modern Europe might convey and/or connect with period beliefs about and understandings of the memory, its process, and its function. Proposed papers should engage with memory from an art historical approach. How did early modern people believe memories were made? How was memory and its process visualized? How and where were memories thought to be stored? What early modern artistic forms were particularly successful in expressing and perpetuating memories? Do certain early modern artworks function to store or reawaken memories?

Paper topics might consider (but are not limited to):
– Studies of the brain
– Visual mnemonics in early modernity
– Memory as a physical alteration
– Storing memories in the heart or mind
– Commemorative artworks or monuments
– Reuse of art objects
– Preservation and alteration
– Portraiture
– Family memory
– Social memory
– Religious memory and mnemonics
– Constructs of memory
– Fabricated memories
– Death masks and tombs
– Medical and scientific manuscripts
– Repetition and memory

To submit a paper proposal, please email Rebecca Howard, Department of Art, University of Memphis (beccamarie47gmail.com) by July 20. Participants will be notified by July 30. Your email should include the following:

– Full name, current affiliation (if applicable, preferred email address, and PhD completion date (past or expected)
– Paper title (15-word maximum)
– Abstract (150-word maximum) with 3-5 keywords listed below
– CV (5-page maximum)
– Any audio/visual requirements

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[3] Reassessing epistemic images: objectivity, accuracy, utility reconsidered

From: Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen
Date: 1 July 2019

Panel organizers:
Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen (Utrecht University)
Ruth S. Noyes (National Museum of Denmark)

This panel takes up the questions of the issue of reassessing the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary studies in early modern artistic episteme—images and objects implicated in the acquisition, production and presentation of knowledge—from the point of view of reconsidering the role of objectivity, accuracy, and utility in epistemic images. The period between 1400 and 1700 witnessed the production of aesthetic and heuristic images across diverse knowledge domains (astronomy, natural history, botany, cartography, anatomy, to name a few) characterized by unprecedented facticity and exactitude. These epistemic images disclosed overt or implicit claims to utility and truth on the basis of utilization of authenticated sources, accurately reconstituted by means of precise methods often enabled by nascent material technologies. Traditionally, the emergence of such images has often been viewed as a turn toward greater accuracy in the service of social utility.

This panel invites reconsiderations of the meanings and motivations of purported “truthiness” in epistemic images. It aims to explore the possibility that in certain cases, while the ultimate consequences of early modern veristic methods in image-making were greater realism and, perhaps, accuracy, these consequences were not necessarily identical to the motives that first prompted such methods.

Possible questions include:

Are there cases where accuracy and utility of epistemic imaging projects could be understood less as an actual practical goal and more as a rhetorical strategy?

Were such media enlisted as part of socioepistemological processes aimed at validating and raising the cultural-intellectual standing of their makers?

Was the dissemination of such images through replication (i.e. print) aimed at creating a uniformly disciplined and geographically transcendent virtual school of tutees?

Do the open and implied assertions of truthfulness and accuracy inherent to these images evince a desire on the part of their producers to create and answer a demand for new forms of visual discourse more relevant to their own needs?

We welcome papers that consider these or other pertinent questions.

Please send a Word document (.doc or .docx) with the following to Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen (w.h.chenuu.nl) and Ruth Noyes (Ruth.Sargent.Noyesnatmus.dk):

- Name and affiliation
- Paper Title (15-word maximum)
- Abstract of 150 words
- CV of 300 words

Please submit proposals by July 25, 2019. Presenters will need to be members of RSA by the time of the conference.

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[4] NONEXTANT

From: Dawn Odell
Date: 3 July 2019

Panel organizers:
Dana E. Katz (katzdareed.edu)
Dawn Odell (dvolclark.edu)
What do we learn from the study of objects, images, texts, and performances that no longer exist? How do we write histories of things that are absent, silent, destroyed, or lost? What kinds of methodologies do studies of nonextant materials employ? How do ekphrasis, iconoclasm, memory, re-enactment, and reconstruction factor into such work?

We are organizing two interdisciplinary panels for the Renaissance Society of America conference in Philadelphia on April 2-4, 2020 that explore things that are no longer extant. We seek to study this subject between and through disciplinary boundaries, and encourage papers that test new methodologies and/or consider the implications of the nonextant in the historiography of our disciplines. Please send a 150-word abstract and short CV to Dana E. Katz (katzdareed.edu) and Dawn Odell (dvolclark.edu) by Monday, July 22, 2019.