CFP: Instauro/Restauro at The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia Oct. 22-25, 2015
Deadline: April 5, 2015

Instauro/Restauro: Recreating, Reforming and Rebuilding in the Sixteenth Century

In seeking to restore the ancient past in the present, Petrarca hoped to renew and restitute it—a nostalgia that helped fuel Dante's anachronistic approach to literature, placing the classical world in direct dialogue with his Trecento moment. By collecting, imitating, translating, and citing classical authors, fifteenth-century humanists and artists sought to recover the history of the ancient past. This ambitious philological and archaeological project allowed for the creation of novel theories, approaches, and methods to recording and visualizing their contemporary world.

By the sixteenth-century, establishing teleological and genealogical links with the ancient world served to justify political and economic goals of secular and religious leaders, leading some theologians and writers, including Erasmus, Luther, Montaigne and Rebelais among others, to be skeptical of such restoration efforts. Indeed, restoring the past was conceived as a way of reforming the present, of making it anew; hence, unearthed ruins acted less as relics and more as aids in discursive and material processes of rebuilding, recreating, rewriting, and remaking history and its artifacts. To restore was to intervene in and comment upon broader historical motions of destruction and reconstruction, a point especially relevant to the religious contexts of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

Restoration was a central aspect of theoretical and practical expertise in art and architecture. Both Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari commented on the relationship between the creative and the restorative processes, since acts of restoration were often additive, rather than curative: whether through copying, reusing or piecing together of disparate sculptural, architectural, and painted fragments. Curiously, Cellini dismissed restorers altogether as a “trade of botchers,” raising questions about the very nature of restoration as a process of intervention and preservation—a point central to modern discourses on conservation more generally.

We invite papers for two interdisciplinary panels for SCSC 2015 that explore and engage with literary, visual, and theoretical approaches to restoration in the sixteenth century. Please send a 250-word abstract and short CV to Victoria Addona (vaddonafas.harvard.edu) and Ivana Vranic (ivana.vranicubc.ca) by April 5th, 2015.

For more information on The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) and the annual meeting in Vancouver please visit http://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conference.