-----------------------------
[1] Roundtable: Curating the Early Modern Now
From: Sophie Pitman
Date: July 10th, 2023
Deadline: August 1st, 2023

How do, can, and should we present the early modern period to the many publics that museums strive to reach today? The Black Lives Matter Movement, #MeToo, and the call out culture of @changethemuseum precipitated many public-facing reckonings in the museum field in recent years. Challenged by questions of relevance and calls to remove problematic histories even before these movements and the financial devastation of massive Covid-19 closures, curators at institutions large and small have been raising important questions about the visual and material histories of the early modern period through interpretive and curatorial strategies that demonstrate the continuing relevance of historic collections today.

This roundtable invites 7-10 minute case studies focused on an exhibition or permanent collection project in progress or on view within the last five years that open up conversation about:

- the role 21st century issues or contemporary art can or should play in presenting the complexity and nuance of the early modern period
- how can unrecorded histories, perspectives, or lived experiences be made visual and tangible, especially in museums populated primarily by elite objects?
- how can institutional DEIA initiatives meaningfully and authentically influence our work and open up new research questions?
- how have the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, or call out culture influenced the narratives we present and the language we use to do so?
- we also welcome proposals that engage with other opportunities and challenges facing curators of early modern materials, or that address teaching the early modern period in the twenty-first century museum

Please send a 250-word abstract and CV to panel organizers:
Hannah Wirta Kinney, Curator of Academic Programs at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (hkinneyoberlin.edu), and
Sophie Pitman, Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director, Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (spitmanwisc.edu)

by August 1st, 2023. Applicants will be notified by August 10th 2023.

RSA will take place at the Palmer Hotel, Chicago, IL from March 21–23, 2024. Speakers must be members of RSA.

-----------------------------
[2] Depicting Dante’s Commedia: Image, Text, and Exegesis
From: Rebecca Bowen
Date: July 10th, 2023
Deadline: August 4th, 2023

This panel invites papers that explore early modern depictions of Dante from intermedial perspectives. How were Dante’s words transformed into images and what kind of intermedial networks surrounded these visual mediations (including commentaries and other paratexts)? What relationships developed between Dante’s writings and the material supports that preserved, translated, and disseminated his texts? How did material responses to Dante’s works vary across different temporal and geographical realities, especially outside the traditional centres of Italian book production? Topics of interest include:

- The social and historical conditions surrounding early modern visualisations of Dante’s poem;
- Specific examples of the visuality and visual capacity of Dante’s writings;
- Entanglements between illumination cycles and textual commentaries on Dante’s works;
- Questions of book history and mis-en-page, especially as these shifted between manuscript and print culture;
- The influence of transnational receptions of Dante’s texts on these intermedial traditions.

This panel is promoted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence–Max-Plank-Institut’s new digital commentary ‘Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis around the Commedia’, to which speakers may be invited to submit papers for publication.

Paper proposals should be submitted by August 4th to Rebecca.bowenkhi.fi.it, including a paper title (15-word maximum); a paper abstract (200-word maximum); and resume/CV (max 3 pages).

-----------------------------
[3] Enhancing Early Modern Visual Resources in the Digital Space
From: Rafael Brundo Uriarte
Date: July 10th, 2023
Deadline: August 4th, 2023

This panel seeks to showcase digital humanities projects that enhance the accessibility, visibility, and tractability of resources designed to analyse visual and material culture of the Early Modern era. Proposals are invited from projects that explore methods and structural solutions for maximising the capabilities of digital resources to display and analyse visual and material sources and relate them to textual and contextual information. Reflections on the nature of interdisciplinary working practices, the impact of AI in this context, the limitations of technological strategies, and other challenges faced by visually-oriented digital projects focused on the Early Modern era are welcome, as are projects that offer solutions to issues surrounding global archival accessibility. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, projects that present:

- Innovative strategies for digitising and displaying Early Modern visual and material sources;
- Structural solutions for organising and interlinking visual and textual sources in a user-friendly way;
- Machine learning solutions that attempt to raise new research questions or offer fresh perspectives on the intricate relationships between image and text;
- Reflections on the benefits and limitations of producing digital outputs alongside or instead of print publications.

This panel is promoted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut's new digital commentary ‘Dante Depicted: A Commentary on Image, Text, and Exegesis around the Commedia’.

Paper proposals should be submitted by August 4th to Rafael.uriartekhi.fi.it or Rebecca.bowenkhi.fi.it, including a paper title (15-word maximum); a paper abstract (200-word maximum); your resume (max 3 pages).

-----------------------------
[4] Renaissance Intermediality
From: Marisa Bass
Date: July 12th, 2023
Deadline: July 28th, 2023

When an early owner of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights wished to celebrate his painting, he had it reconceived as a tapestry. What was gained and what was lost in this
transformation? Many early modern artists designed works in different media. This was true Italians such as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Rosso, and of Netherlanders such as Bernard van Orley and Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Although art historians have focussed on the paintings by these artists, several of them designed tapestry, stained glass, sculpture, and architecture.

Artworks also relate to ritual and notions of performance. What types of communication and value did each of the many media allow and express? The role of drawing became essential to all arts, but drawing alone could not define the material and spatial properties of other media nor was drawing one thing in itself.

Concepts of skeuomorphism, affordance, and transmorphism have occupied scholars from James J. Gibson, Donald Norman, and W.J.T. Mitchell, among others. We invite papers that examine theories that underlie these ideas along with principles of word-and-image relations, artistic mode, categories and functions of drawing, theatricality, and the role of family and professional networks. We will investigate the artistic culture of the Europe as a system, and we concentrate
on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Please send an abstract of not more than 400 words, a title, and a CV by July 28th, 2023 to matt.kavalerutoronto.ca and marisa.bassyale.edu

-----------------------------
[5] Cardinal as Satellites. Convergence and conflict between Papal and Cardinal courts (1471-1563)
From: Arnold Witte
Date: July 12th, 2023
Deadline: August 5th, 2023

During the Renaissance, cardinals’ patronage assumed a programmatic – if not moral – connotation: «domus cardinalium patens hospitium, portusque ac refugium proborum et doctorum maxime virorum et pauperum nobilium, honestarumque personarum esse debeat».

These instructions from the 1514 bull Supernae dispositionis arbitrio agree with Cortesi’s De cardinalatu (1510): cardinals’ courts must receive and promote scholars, men of letters and artists; magnificentia constitutes a virtue as well as a moral obligation. The current approach to cardinals’ patronage finds its roots in publications by Montalto, Chambers and Haskell, who focused predominantly with individual cardinals. This field has been recently been broadened with prosopographic perspectives focusing on the cardinals’ social, political and religious networks.

Gigliola Fragnito’s 1993 analysis of the cardinals’ familiae introduced the concept of satellite courts, contributing to the splendour of the Papal image. However, the relation between the court of the pope and those of his cardinals has not yet been the subject of broader studies. This panel, organized by Arnold Witte and Daniele Pelosi, will thus explore the opposing forces of collaboration and hidden or open antagonism that characterized the patronage relationships between the Papal court and the cardinals’ courts from Sixtus IV’s pontificate to the closure of the Tridentine Council. By combining examples of artistic, cultural, political and social patronage, the panel will analyze the subject in relation to the political-institutional evolution of the papal monarchy, the role assigned to cardinals during the Renaissance and artistic and cultural display in Renaissance Rome.

Invited are papers on the following topics:
- Changing relations between cardinals and popes: patrons and brokers within the roman courts
- Cardinals as substitutes, representatives or collaborators of pontifical patronage
- Spiritualism, schisms and dissent: cardinalitial patronage and religious conflicts
- The rise of the papal absolutism and the submission of the cardinals to papal authority
- Cardinals’ display and their collective identity as representatives of the Institution.

Submission requirements:
Please submit a paper title, abstract (300 words max), name and affiliation to
a.a.witteuva.nl and daniele.pelosiunive.it

-----------------------------
[6] Text, Image, and the Embodiment of Antiquity in Early Modern Print
From: Rachel M. Carlisle
Date: July 13th, 2023
Deadline: August 1st, 2023

Scholarship has long acknowledged the significance of classicism during the early modern period. This so-called “rebirth” or revival of antiquity manifested in literature, images, and architecture as word of newly unearthed objects spread. Humanist scholars wrangled with classical texts and the wealthy amassed collections of ancient objects. This panel considers how the early modern print provided access to classical imagery and circulated information about antiquity to a larger public. In what ways did printmakers adapt classical modes of communication? What types of imagery were marketed for broader use and visual pleasure? Moving beyond the significance of antiquity for elite humanist circles, this panel invites research that explores how the print medium adopted and transformed classical subject matter for an early modern public.

Proposals must include:
- paper title (15-word maximum)
- abstract (200-word maximum)
- curriculum vitae (.pdf, no longer than 5 pages)
- PhD or other terminal degree completion date (past or expected)
- primary discipline
- full name, current affiliation, and email address

Interested participants are invited to send their proposals to co-organizers Dr. Lacy Gillette (lgillettefsu.edu) and Dr. Rachel M. Carlisle (rachel.carlisleuah.edu) by August 1st, 2023. Decisions regarding acceptance will be provided at least one week prior to the deadline of August 15th, 2023 for RSA Chicago 2024 general submissions.