WAKING THE DEAD
Sublime poetics and popular culture in the aftermath of the French
Revolution

Académie de France in Rome & Royal Dutch Institute Rome
28 and 29 January 2011

One of the oldest claims of art is that it can bring back the dead. Leon
Battista Alberti for instance included this claim in his praise of the
Painter's art in De Pictura, where it is part of the humanist interest in
the rhetorical concept of enargeia, a representation, be it in words or
images, that is so lifelike, so vivid, that it seems to dissolve the
representation into what it represents. But what happens when this endeavour
to animate the inanimate matter of the work of art is applied not to the
high art of the Renaissance and the Baroque, in the accepted contexts and
genres of religion and politics, where it is anchored in generally accepted
poetics, artistic canons and aesthetic traditions, but in periods of
profound upheaval, such as the French Revolution?
To those who lived through the events of 1789-98, it seemed as if an
irreparable gap had opened between the past of the Ancien Régime and the
present times which were completely out of joint. The way artists and
writers have tried to cope with this sense of loss (in many cases compounded
by very real personal loss of relatives and friends who had died under the
guillotine) has often been studied, and recently the concept of the sublime
has been evoked for instance by the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit
to define the undefinable experience of a complete break with the past. In
this conference we want to take a close look at one particular artistic
variety of dealing with the French Revolution: the rise of new genres of
popular culture such as the panorama, the tableau vivant or phantasmagoria
to bring back events such as the execution of the King and Queen of France,
the storming of the Bastille, or dead persons. These performances or
installations drew on all the arts, drew huge crowds, and were often so
effective in creating the illusion that the dead had returned from the grave
that viewers fainted or became hysterical with terror. If, as David
Freedberg observed on the closing page of The Power of Images, "we think we
can escape bad dreams by talking about art", these terrifying performances,
fraught with loss and guilt, propose a particular challenge for art history.
In this conference we welcome reconstructions of such performances,
considerations of the role the various arts, and in particular architecture
and acting played in them; but we are also interested in investigations of
some more general themes:
- The shift from extreme vividness as a humanist concern with enargeia and
life to a coupling of such vividness with death, loss, terror and the
abject; how, in other words, did the poetics of suggesting life evolve into
a technique of terror?
- Shifts in the relation between high and low art: how, for instance, did
the high art of architectural and archaeological reconstructions of ancient
monuments feed into the staging of tableaux vivants and panoramas?
- What do these performances tell us about the rise of new aesthetic
categories such as the sublime and the uncanny; or the development of new
artistic and aesthetic experiences such as the Gothic frisson or Ruinenlust?
- Can we identify particular objects, works of art or buildings as
particularly significant for such attempts to bring back the dead?

This conference is funded by the Dutch Foundation of Scientific Research
(NWO) and sponsored by the Académie de France and the Dutch Royal Institute
in Rome. The scientific committee consists of Marc Bayard (Académie de
France, Villa Medici, Rome), Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels and Sigrid de
Jong (Dept. of Art History, Leiden University), and Bram van Oostveldt
(Dept. of Theatre Studies, University of Amsterdam).

Please send an abstract of 350 words, together with a short cv and list of
relevant publications in English or French before July 1, 2010 to Marc
Bayard (marc.bayardvillamedici.it) and Caroline van Eck
(c.a.van.eckhum.leidenuniv.nl).