Call for Papers for the Sixteenth Century Society Conference (22-25 October 2015, Vancouver):
Narrative Strategies in Early Modern Art

From Lessing onward, scholarship about the visual arts has increasingly questioned the nature of ekphrastic description both in antiquity and in the early modern period, addressing the difficulties of aligning two differing systems of communication, the verbal and the visual. Aside from portraiture and some categories of devotional imagery (such as domestic Madonnas and sacre conversazioni altarpieces), most early modern figural artwork had some direct or indirect relationship with one (or more) textual sources. Some textual sources (the telling of the Raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John, for example) are lengthy and prolix, offering the artist a continuous set of narrative actions and personages from which to draw; others, such as the establishment of the threefold nature of the Trinity, are given such brief (and non-visual) mention that the iconographic tradition developed a distinct and amplified vocabulary beyond the written source. Narrative artworks could also operate intertextually, constructing meaning in conversation with other images independent of a written (or oral) source. Our session seeks papers that investigate unusual or singular narrative strategies in Early Modern art. We are particularly interested in papers on visual narratives that move beyond traditional translatio and conventional iconography, images that challenge or reinterpret the textual through visual means.

Please email a brief abstract (maximum 250 words) and a 1-page CV to both Mark Rosen (mark.rosenutdallas.edu) and Diana Presciutti (dpresciuttiwooster.edu) by April 6, 2015.