self-portrait (Montreal, 24-26 Mar 11)

Call for Papers

RSA - Renaissance Society of America

24-26 March 2011, Montréal

The divine painter figure. Demiurgical portrait and self-portrait.

Few people have risen the question of the Renaissance self-portrait from
the point of view of the scenario of production, in the sense of Victor
Stoichita's terms. By involving the idea of a learned visual assembly
established by the artist, the scenario of production takes its own line on
the painting and on the figure of the artist. In the context of the new
status of painting in the Quattrocento as a liberal art, we propose to
examine how the artist presents himself in his own pictorial scenography.

With this in prospect, the christomorphism of Dürer and its strategy which
consists in using the very strongly stressed religious imaging's
connotations is well known. But how acts more precisely the painter who
watches himself painting, the one who plays with usurpation and camouflage
of identity and disguised himself as saint Luc or as other sacred
characters? Within the genre of the self-portrait, how to consider the
emphasis placed on a physical motive, the painter's hand, which refers
inexorably to the artistic literature of the period and to the inseparable
link between concetto (the designo, design and invention) and componimento
inculto ? And if we return to Aby Warburg's sentence, "God is in the
details", what can reveal the intimist micrography of the Northern artists
about their artistic position in the realization of self-portraits within
the painted mirrors ?

Particularly welcomed are the papers dealing with anthropological
modalities of the portrait and self-portrait as a demiurge, in the visual
arts of the Renaissance. From the notions of ressemblance and
identification, we would like to analyze the pictorial dispositives and the
discourses on art in order to understand the aesthetic motivations of the
artists to represent themselves as the alter-ego of the God of the
Judeo-Christian thought.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- The literary or philosophical use of the demiurgic metaphor

- The painter and the Imitatio Christi

- The self-portrait as a saint and the variants assimilating the painter to
the divine

- The " mise en abyme " of the iconography of saint Luc by the painters

- The legends relative to the Mandylion of Edessa, to Veronica's veil, to
the real portrait of the Christ

- The notion of resemblance and fictious resemblance

- The avatars of the demiurgical analogy in the Icon or in the Non- Western
Arts during the modern period,

and also the posterity and the reception of this ancient paradigm until
contemporary period

Please send an abstract (150 words maximum) and a CV (including and
institutional affiliation and contact information) by May 21, 2010
simultaneously to :

florence.chantouryumontreal.ca
natachapernacyahoo.fr

Organizers :
Dr. Florence Chantoury-Lacombe, invited professor, Department of art
history and cinematographic studies, University of Montreal
Dr. Natacha Pernac, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Université Lille 3

Speakers must be members of the RSA at the time of the conference.