The First Annual Postgraduate Renaissance Symposium: ‘Beyond the Frame:
Portraits and Personal Experience in Renaissance Europe, c.1400 – 1650’

In Renaissance art historical scholarship, the category of the portrait
has provided a key framework for thinking about and discussing
representations of the individual, an emphasis that has been echoed in
a range of recent exhibitions celebrating Renaissance ‘faces’.

The inaugural Renaissance postgraduate symposium invites new scholars
to explore the limits of this framework. It aims to encourage students
of the Renaissance, in its broadest definition, to consider the
domestic, devotional and urban environments of portraits. Contributors
are invited to consider how the experience of viewing, commissioning
and living with portraits affects our understanding of their meaning
and function, situating the images within their historical contexts
rather than within the museum’s exhibition space. Likewise, we invite
participants to challenge the terminology of portraiture and to
consider objects and images which do not fit into the conventional
category of the ‘portrait’ but which nevertheless ‘portray’
individuals.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:
- Self-fashioning
- Portraiture and problems of terminology
- Public and private spaces for portraits
- Portraiture and its relationship to literature, music & architecture
- Fashion, make-up and adornment
- Experience of the domestic space
- Mimesis
- The role of the patron
- New media: engravings, woodcuts, etchings
- The relationship between portrait and narrative
- Author portraits and book illustrations
- Funerary monuments
- Exhibiting Renaissance portraiture
- Collecting habits

The Renaissance Symposium offers the opportunity for research students
at all levels from universities in the UK and abroad to present their
research and receive feedback in a friendly and constructive
environment. We cannot offer travel subsidies for speakers, and
therefore students from outside London are encouraged to apply to their
institutions for funding to attend the symposium.

Please send proposals of 250 words for papers of 20 minutes, and a
short biography to: renaissance.consortiumcourtauld.ac.uk by 20
January 2012

Organised by Emily Gray and Harriette Peel (The Courtauld Institute of
Art)

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2012/summer/28apr_RenaissanceSymposium.shtml