10)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting
8-10 April 2010
Venice
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola San Giorgio Maggiore

Session: Pictorial Space in Early Modern Venice

Since the Renaissance, the identity of early modern Venetian painting
is mostly defined by the terms of color and colorism. Instead of
reinforcing the modernist idea that flat color is opposed to a
perspectival representation of space based on disegno, this panel
intends to explore the possibilities and limits of a coloristic or
painterly construction of space and its supposed Venetian specificity.
This session focuses not only on the historical development of
techniques for the construction pictorial space, but also deals with
the interactions between represented and real spaces. We welcome
papers that discuss Venetian painting with reference to:

- the concept of a coloristic or painterly production of
pictorial space

- the social, gendered, and bodily notions of space specific
to Venetian art (sotto in sù viewing, civic land-marking,
gestural painterly textures, large-scale narratives, illusionist
façade painting, spatial immersion etc.)

- the development, function, and rhetoric of linear perspective
in Venice and the Veneto (since Jacopo Bellini, in comparison with
the Central-Italian paradigm)

- the compositional and technical problems in constructing
pictorial spaces within large architectural settings and
specifically Venetian urban contexts

- the inter-cultural exchanges between Venetian spatial
constructions and Byzantine and Islamic concepts of space

- the interrelation between painting and theater
in Venice and the Veneto

- the architectural and urban idealizations and utopias of
Venice compared to real sites and environments

- the supposed importance of the lagoon´s climatic and geographic
conditions for the construction and perception of space

- the representations of the topography and geography, the
communication and transport networks of the Venetian Republic
and its global trading empire

- the invention and visualization of inner and outer, mental and civic
spaces

Scholars interested in a historical or theoretical reflection on
the construction of pictorial space in early modern Venice are
invited to submit a paper title, an abstract of 150 words, and a
short CV by e-mail in English or Italian to the organizers before
1 May 2009. Speakers must be members of the Renaissance Society of
America at the time of the conference.

Please, consult the RSA website for practical information:

http://www.rsa.org

Organizers:
Stefan Neuner (neunerkhist.uzh.ch)
Tristan Weddigen (tristan.weddigenkhist.uzh.ch)
Institute of Art History
University of Zurich
http://www.khist.unizh.ch