The Art of Truth: Providing Evidence in Early Modern Bologna

A one day international workshop, organized by The Norwegian Institute in Rome – University of Oslo

Where does the truth lie? In a period where critical and alternative versions of truth proliferate and compete, this proves to be an essential question. This one-day workshop uses Bologna and its art as a starting point to reflect on theories and attitudes concerning truth and truth-telling in the early modern period.

Far from imposing a simplistic (and ultimately anachronistic) image of Bologna as “the City of Truth,” we intend to approach the strategies adopted to ponder, support, and deny notions of fact and norm, in both textual and visual representations, from various angles. What will emerge is a notion of truth as a process: a regulative principle that underscores the demonstrative nature of the visual discourses in the early modern time.


PROGRAM

11.45 Mattia Biffis
The Norwegian Institute in Rome – University of Oslo
Introduction: Shaping Truth

12.00 Giovanna Perini Folesani
Università degli Studi di Urbino
Ludovico Carracci a Roma

13.00 Break

14.30 Morten Steen Hansen
Danish Academy in Rome – Novo Nordisk Foundation
Alcina’s Artifice and the Untruthfulness of Painting: Nicolò dell’Abate’s Ariosto Cycle in Bologna

15.00 Luca Esposito
Università di Roma La Sapienza
L’“effetto di reale”: la Rückenfigur nell’arte dei Carracci, tra natura e artificio

16.00 Break

16.30 Florike Egmond
University of Leiden
Circulation and copying of naturalia drawings in the 16thcentury: Aldrovandi, Bologna and the question of relevant context

17.00 Samantha L. Smith
University of Bergen
Truth and the Transunto: A copy of the Holy Shroud in sixteenth-century Bologna

17.30 Ariella Minden
University of Toronto – Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
The Eye and the Scalpel: Anatomy between the Workshop and the Treatise in Sixteenth-Century Bologna

18.00 Conclusion