Enfilade

From the Call for Papers:

Sacred Ceramics: Devotional Images in European Porcelain
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 30 September 2025

Organized by Matthew Martin and Rebecca Klarner

Proposals due by 30 April 2025

Meissen Figure of the Virgin Immaculata, probably modelled by Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, ca.1730–33 (Courtesy of E & H Manners, London).

The extensive sculptural output of Europe’s first kaolinic porcelain factory, the Saxon Meissen manufactory, has long attracted the attention of art historians. The large-scale animal sculptures executed so early in the factory’s history for the Japanese Palace, impress both for their technical ambition, and as evidence of the genius of Johann Joachim Kändler in capturing the liveliness of his animal subjects. But there is a significant area of Meissen’s sculptural output that has not to date received sustained attention: the sculptures on religious subjects produced during the reigns of Augustus II and Augustus III. Works such as Kändler’s Death of St Francis Xavier of c.1738–40 and the large Crucifixion group of 1743, represent some of the most complex sculptural works ever produced at Meissen. Yet these, and related works, have only relatively recently begun to be studied in detail (Antonin 2010; Leps 2020).

Despite this relative neglect, it is clear that Meissen’s religious sculptures played an important role in the projection of power at the Saxon Polish court. In part this was political: the conversion of Augustus II and Augustus III to Catholicism was necessary for them to be eligible for election to the crown of Poland. The marriage of Augustus III to the Catholic Maria Josepha of Austria also suggests much loftier political ambitions on the part of the Wettin electors, with the imperial crown clearly a potential prize. Signalling the Saxon court’s Catholicism was a vital political exercise and Meissen’s religious sculpture played a central role in this project (Cassidy-Geiger 2007).

But there are indications that a more complex cultural phenomenon lay behind the creation of porcelain devotional images. The pioneering work of Baxandall on limewood sculpture of the Renaissance has drawn attention to the deep significance that medium can hold in the conception and creation of devotional sculpture (Baxandall 1980). We suggest that a similar phenomenon may have been at play in the creation of porcelain religious images. The 1712 letter penned by the Jesuit Father François Xavier d’Entrecolles not only conveyed to Europe first-hand knowledge of Chinese porcelain production at Jingdezhen, it also construed access to this knowledge as a triumph of the Jesuit global mission—the successes of the Jesuits in China made the secret of kaolinic porcelain available to the Catholic princes of Europe. Porcelain’s alchemical heritage was also not without significance: success at the alchemical enterprise had always been deemed a donum dei (Principe 2013). Only with God’s blessing could the experimentalist succeed. These factors could lead to porcelain assuming a sacral character in Catholic court contexts. Devotional images in European porcelain exploited these cultural associations of the medium itself.

Of course, Meissen was not the only European porcelain factory to produce sculpture that employed counter-reformation iconography. The Doccia factory of Count Ginori—himself a natural philosophical experimentalist—was responsible for outstanding religious sculptures in a Florentine Late Baroque manner (Biancalana 2009), while Catholic court manufactories across the Holy Roman Empire—Vienna, Höchst, Fulda, Nymphenburg—produced devotional images in porcelain. Even factories in mid-eighteenth-century England—Chelsea and Derby—produced sculptures employing Catholic devotional imagery (Martin 2013). In each instance, cultural-political motives for the creation of these images can be reconstructed.

This one-day conference aims to investigate this neglected area of eighteenth-century European porcelain production. Topics for 20-minute papers to be presented at the V&A South Kensington on 30 September 2025 might include, but are not limited to:
• Who were the artists and patrons involved in these sculptures’ creation?
• What sources informed their production?
• How did these sculptures function in private and public contexts?
• What significance lay in the use of porcelain, or other ceramic mediums, to create devotional images?

To submit a paper proposal, please send an abstract of 200 words and a biography of up to 100 words to the convenors Dr Matthew Martin, University of Melbourne (mmartin1@unimelb.edu.au), and Rebecca Klarner, University of Leeds (fhrlmk@leeds.ac.uk), by 30 April 2025. Speakers will be informed of whether their proposals have been accepted by mid-May.

From ArtHist.net:

Creating the Museum: Exploring the Museum Impulse in Local, Regional, and National Contexts
Conference of the National Gallery and the Museums and Galleries History Group
London, 26–27 September 2025 (dates still to be confirmed)

Proposals due by 14 March 2025

While the birth of the concept of the museum has attracted lots of scholarly attention and the desire to create new museums is now a global phenomenon, the question of how individual museums, their collections, buildings, and personnel come into being has not been widely considered. As complex organisations, museums have been created through multifaceted sets of initiatives, practices, and activities—raising money, sourcing or commissioning buildings and storage, assembling, organising and interpreting collections, developing expertise, engaging communities, fulfilling a purpose which some groups were more able to prosecute than others. Various periods have seen the flourishing of local, regional, national museums, of large or smaller scale, and of different specialisms and audiences, with varying models of governance. Some passionately wished for museums ultimately stalled, and some proposed museums never quite appeared. Some museums were created for particular audiences, at particular moments, while others evolved from earlier forms of collecting; some required particular buildings in order to begin; some have taken up residence like hermit crabs in whichever spaces were available.

To develop our understanding of the reasons for creating museums and to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the creation of the National Gallery in London, we invite proposals for a conference hosted by the National Gallery and the Museums C Galleries History Group (MGHG). The conference will focus on why and how galleries and museums internationally/globally have emerged and evolved. It will explore the different ways in which museums and public art galleries come into existence and the impulses, rationales, and objectives for ‘creating’ museums, foregrounding the wide range and variety of museum creation and exploring core questions of purpose, meaning, and context, whilst also drawing attention to the specificity of the National Gallery, reflecting on the contexts for its founding impulses and exploring the future roles, purpose, and functions of (inter)national galleries.

We seek papers covering any aspect of museum creation between about 1600 and the present day, for any type of museum, anywhere in the world. Papers should be 15–20 minutes in length; we invite individual proposals as well as proposals for a panel of papers (maximum 4 papers for a panel).

Papers may respond to these questions:
• What impulses led to the creation of museums?
• Under what circumstances have completely new types of museum been created?
• What can museums that never quite came into being, or museums that came and went, tell us?
• What role do collections (if any) play in the creation of museums?
• What role do museum buildings play in acts of creating the museum, or how has the need for physical space of various kinds impacted on the creation of museums?
• What has it taken to create a museum from public funds such as local or national taxes?
• Which individuals have created museums, out of philanthropy, passion, memorialisation or other motivations, and how?
• Is the creation of museums distinctive by specialism (natural history, art gallery, social history, etc)?
• How has the orientation of museums towards particular audiences promoted museum creation in particular ways?
• How do museums’ links with other organisations such as libraries impact on their creation?
• Are there museums whose creation is inexplicable?
• How has the National Gallery positioned itself in relation to other London, UK, and international museums in the past?
• What are the aims and objectives, benefits and drawbacks of branch museums emerging from the ‘centre’ (e.g. VCA, Tate, Guggenheim)?
• How have partnerships developed and what have been the fruits of such partnerships in diverse areas of museum life including Research, Conservation, and Education/Learning?
• What are the funding models currently available which ensure openness and parity within the sector which are worth highlighting for future reference?
• Are there any historical or actual international collaborations which offer particularly positive models for current and future practice (e.g. ICOM)?
• How should an institution like the National Gallery relate to other institutions today?
• How and in what ways is a museum like the National Gallery representative of ‘national’ art?

Please send proposals (200–300 words) with an indication of affiliation and job title to contact@mghg.info by Friday, 14 March 2025. Successful proposals will be informed by 30 April 2025. We welcome proposals from researchers at all career stages. As the conference will be exclusively ‘in person’, please note that successful speakers will be responsible for their own expenses. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.