Call for Papers | Romantic Circulations
From ArtHist.net:
Romantic Circulations
Nordic Association of Romantic Studies Conference
University of Oslo, 10–12 September 2026
Organized by Ellen Rees with Tonje Haugland Sørensen
Proposals due by 1 October 2025
This three-day conference at the University of Oslo invites scholars engaged in the study of romanticism writ large from the expanded Nordic region to present new research on the circulation of romantic ideas and objects. The topic Romantic Circulations encompasses both romantic discourses that arose in the period most typically associated with romanticism, but also the afterlives of romantic ideas, people, objects, discourses, etc. Focusing on processes like dissemination, circulation, and transference, we aim to challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between center and periphery in the spread of romantic discourses and aesthetics. We also posit that the recent turn toward transnational and transdisciplinary aspects of romanticism in scholarship demands a reassessment of approaches, methodologies, and historiographic structures of the field. We therefore encourage meta-theoretical perspectives, as well as meta-critical reevaluations of entrenched narratives about romantic phenomena. We also welcome cultural interventions from various perspectives, including Indigenous, environmental, postcolonial, gender, and other marginalized groups.
With this conference, we aim to expand our understanding of romanticism and explore together how it manifests and adapts in different times, place, and artistic forms. We encourage contributions from a broad range of fields, including art history and visual culture, literary studies, musicology, history of ideas, philosophy, cultural studies and museology, and history.
Keynote Speakers
• Timothy Tangherlini (University of California, Berkeley)
• Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St. Andrews)
We welcome individual proposals as well as pre-constituted panels. Early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Please send an abstract (of no more than 500 words) and a short biography (200 words) by 1 October 2025 to romanticcirculations@gmail.com. Note of acceptance will follow by 1 February 2026.
Organized by Ellen Rees (University of Oslo) in collaboration with Tonje Haugland Sørensen (NARS Executive Committee) and co-funded by the ERC project NORN.
Online Talk | Michael Ohajuru on the Black Presence in European Art
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This evening from YCBA:
Michael Ohajuru | From Subjects of Capital to Makers of Culture
The Black Presence in Western European Art
Online and in-person, Norma Lytton Lecture, Yale Center for British Art, 10 April 2025, 5.30pm (ET)
Michael Ohajuru explores how Black figures, once positioned as exotic, subservient, or symbolic, have moved toward the center of artistic representation—sometimes through shifts in artistic intention, sometimes through reinterpretation by contemporary audiences. Through this lens, Ohajuru questions historical silences and considers how the Black presence in art speaks to the evolving relationship between Black and white identities in the Western world.
Join the livestream here»
Michael Ohajuru is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He blogs, writes, and speaks regularly on identifying, understanding, and interpreting the Black African presence in Renaissance art. He is founder of the Image of the Black in London Galleries, a series of gallery tours that highlight the overt and covert Black presences to be found in the national art collections of London. Ohajuru is the project director of the John Blanke Project, a contemporary art and archive project celebrating John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is also a founding member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network, managing their podcast The BP2 Podcast.
Generous support for this program has been provided by the Norma Lytton Fund for Docent Education, established in memory of Norma Lytton by her family. Lytton was an active docent at the YCBA for more than twenty years and subsequently spent a decade engaged in research for the museum’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture.
Banner images from left to right (all details): Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man, ca. 1758, black limestone on a yellow marble socle (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, Third Earl of Harrington and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas, 1782, oil on canvas (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection); Joanna Mary Wells (née Boyce), Fanny Eaton (née Antwistle or Entwistle), 1861, oil on paper laid to linen (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund); and Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite, detail, 2017, oil on canvas (Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, purchased with a gift from Mary and Sean Kelly in honor of Courtney J. Martin and with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and Friends of British Art Fund. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York).
Exhibition | Hogarth’s Progress
William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress, Plate 1, published 25 June 1735, etching and engraving
(Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, 1975.203)
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Now on view at Oberlin:
Hogarth’s Progress
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, 31 January — 10 August 2025
Organized by Marlise Brown
English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) used his art to hold up a moralizing mirror to all levels of 18th-century society. From rakes to harlots and aristocrats to the clergy—no one was exempt from his biting yet humorous art.
In 1731, Hogarth began creating a series of artworks that he termed ‘modern moral subjects’, which focused on the immoral bend of contemporary London while satirizing the vice and folly of his characters. This exhibition focuses on his first two ‘modern moral subjects’: The Harlot’s Progress (1732), which is a narrative in six scenes, and The Rake’s Progress (1735), which is completed in eight scenes. These sets, offered on subscription, sold out quickly because they were immensely popular with people from all walks of life in England.
Hogarth’s term ‘progress’ was inspired by the book The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published by the English author John Bunyan in 1678. However, unlike the protagonists in Bunyan’s moralizing Christian allegory, Hogarth’s ‘Harlot’ and ‘Rake’ do not grow or learn from life’s experiences. Instead, Hogarth’s narrative series exposes the shallowness of aristocracy, the vices and indulgences of modern London, and showcases complicated ideas in a new form of visual theater.
Organized by Marlise Brown, Assistant Curator of European and American Art.
Call for Papers | ‘Deviant’ Women and the Visual Arts
From ArtHist.net:
‘Deviant’ Women and the Visual Arts
University of Bristol, 10 July 2025
Proposals due by 5 May 2025
The Women and the Visual Arts Research Cluster at the University of Bristol is excited to announce our forthcoming symposium taking place at the University of Bristol on Thursday, 10th July 2025. Women have long been viewed as ‘deviant’ in their roles as artists, authors, models, patrons, and collectors. Their paths to becoming artists or patrons may ‘deviate’ from the norm, their chosen medium or subjects may diverge from those expected by the market, and their representations of themselves and those around them may be unorthodox compared to the art historical canon. How can we, as researchers, contextualise this ‘deviancy’ in our work on women and the visual arts?
We welcome submissions that think about women’s ‘deviancy’ in their relationship to the visual arts in diverse ways: women who push the boundaries on what has been seen as the norm or whose work is divergent from accepted standards. While we are explicitly seeking contributions that foreground the visual, we are excited to hear from colleagues working across fields and disciplines, including (but not limited to) history of art, visual culture, classics, film and theatre studies, history, religious studies, and those doing practice-based research.
Potential topics could include, but are not limited to
• Exhibiting and collecting strategies used by women or the curation and collecting of work by women
• Self-representation and self-portraiture — identity and sexuality
• Transnational feminine identities — culture, race, immigration, and exile
• The nude and representations of the body
• The archive — the formation of celebrity, reception, and legacy
• Women and the environment
• Women’s work — motherhood, domesticity, labour, artist collectives
• ‘Deviant’ use of artistic medium through textual approaches, the applied arts, craft, performance, etc.
In addition to proposals for papers, we also welcome submissions for videos or artist talks related to the symposium’s themes. To apply, please submit a 150- to 200-word abstract with a short bio to Helena Anderson (helena.anderson@bristol.ac.uk) and Valéria Fülöp-Pochon (vf15404@bristol.ac.uk) by Monday, 5th May 2025.
Art History 48 (February 2025)
The 18th century in the latest issue of Art History:
Art History 48 (February 2025)
a r t i c l e s
• Oliver Wunsch, “The Aesthetic Redemption of the Black Body in Eighteenth-Century France,” pp. 14–44.
Audiences in eighteenth-century France felt little compunction about admiring African people in art while denigrating them in life. They reconciled this apparent contradiction through a belief in the ameliorative effects of art, yielding what is described here as a theory of aesthetic redemption. This essay argues that the theory of aesthetic redemption that developed in eighteenth-century France gave art a unique position in the construction of race. Because those who believed in the possibility of aesthetic redemption distinguished between art’s content and its manner of representation, they created the conditions for artists to depict people of colour using materials, techniques, and formal structures whose qualities would otherwise be considered at odds with the subject. The resulting art often strikes audiences today as progressive, yet it did little to challenge the biases of the original viewers, who admired aesthetic departures from stereotypes precisely because they took those stereotypes for granted.
• Diarmuid Costello, “Die Schönheit des Mittelmenschen: Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘Everyday Beauty’,” pp. 132–61.
This essay considers Stephan Balkenhol’s ‘everyman and woman’ sculptures through the optic of Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’ (§17, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, 1790). I take a pair of miniature figures as my test case. Despite minor variations, all these sculptures depict the same generic man and woman, a man or woman who average or middling in every way. What could make depictions of average everydayness so compelling? For a clue, I turn to Kant’s ‘ideal of beauty’. This comprises a ‘standard aesthetic idea’ and an ‘idea of reason’: the former is a (culturally specific) ‘model image’ of the human being; the latter implicates Kant’s (universal) conception of ‘humanity in the person’, where the latter manifests itself through the former. I ask whether this illuminates Balkenhol’s work, suggesting that although the relevance of the former is clear, and the latter less so, there is reason not to rule it out.
• Viccy Coltman, “Travelling Knick-Knacks and Picturesque Points of View: Reverend James Plumptre’s Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey … to the Highlands of Scotland … in the Summer of the Year 1799,” pp. 162–84.
This essay revisits later eighteenth-century picturesque aesthetics in Britain as they were articulated in theory, applied in practice, and reproduced in travel literature and art. It considers the sometimes congruent, at other times contested, relationship between the natural landscape, written descriptions of that landscape, and its pictorial representation. Focusing on unpublished extracts from Reverend James Plumptre’s manuscript travel journal, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey […] to the Highlands of Scotland […] in the Summer of the Year 1799, it argues for an original interpretation of the pedestrian picturesque as a suite of practices which entailed travelling by foot, viewing the landscape with a range of hand-held implements or ‘knick-knacks’, and representing nature ‘as seen’ without remedial artistic correction or improvement. According to this account, ‘people, places, and things’ becomes a useful rubric for conceptualising Plumptre’s 1799 pedestrian tour of Scotland which included visits to the Edinburgh studios of artists Alexander Nasmyth, Henry Raeburn, and Hugh William Williams.
r e v i e w s
• Brigid von Preussen, “A Woman’s Work,” Review of Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (Yale UP, 2022) and Rosalind Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries, 2023), pp. 186–92.
Call for Papers | Material Culture Pre-1850 Workshop, Lifecycles
From the announcement:
Lifecycles | Material Culture Pre-1850 Workshop, University of Cambridge
Hybrid format, alternate Monday evenings, Easter Term 2025
Proposals due by 28 April 2025
The Material Culture pre-1850 Workshop at the University of Cambridge invites submissions for 20-minute papers. Our theme for Easter term is Lifecycles, which we frame as encompassing the ways in which objects endure their afterlives; the manners in which they are transferred, rarefied, treasured, rearranged, commodified, used up, mended and destroyed. Papers may wish to respond to this concept particularly in terms of object biography.
The workshop is a forum for researchers at all career stages to discuss the material culture of the medieval period, early modernity, and the long eighteenth century. We welcome submissions from all disciplines. The workshop will meet in a hybrid format on alternate Monday evenings from 5 to 7pm GMT.
Submissions must include a title, abstract (250 words), and brief academic bio, to be sent to Sophia Feist (stcf2@cam.ac.uk) and Tomas Brown (tbnb2@cam.ac.uk) by 28 April 2025. Submissions with potentially distressing content should include a warning, excluded from the word count.
Ten Axioms: Drimmer and Nygren on Art History and AI
I was slow finding this essay on artificial intelligence, but it strikes me as immensely helpful (it seems someone asks me about art and AI at least once a week these days). –CH
Sonja Drimmer and Christopher Nygren, “Art History and AI: Ten Axioms,” International Journal for Digital Art History 10 (2023): 5.01–10. Link»
One of a handful of digital images accompanying the article created by Dall-e-2 using the following prompt: “the history of art as understood by artificial intelligence.”
Abstract | AI has become an increasingly prevalent tool for researchers working in Digital Art History. The promise of AI is great, but so are the ethical and intellectual issues it raises. Here we propose 10 axioms related to the use of AI in art historical research that scholars should consider when embarking on such projects, and we make some proposals for how these axioms might be integrated into disciplinary conversations.
Sonja Drimmer is associate professor of medieval art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research is chiefly concerned with the book arts of the Middle Ages, addressing in particular issues of mediation, collaborative production, and replication. She is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018), which received High Commendation for Exemplary Scholarship from the Historians of British Art.
Christopher J. Nygren is associate professor of early modern art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2022, his book, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance (Penn State, 2020), won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. Profesoor Nygren is also developing several collaborative research projects, including in the Digital Humanities. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Principal Investigator on “The Morelli Machine,” a project funded by the National Science Foundation that sought to examine whether computational methods might be used in the attribution of Old Master paintings.
Conference | Traveling Marble, 18th–20th Centuries
From ArtHist.net:
Traveling Marble: Agents, Networks, Technologies, 18th–20th Centuries
Thorvaldsen’s Museum, Copenhagen, 10 April 2025
Organized by Amalie Skovmøller and Ariane Varela Braga
Through thousands of years, white marble stones have been quarried and circulated to be consumed for architectural and artistic purposes worldwide. The stones are known from ancient Greek and Roman cultures, but during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, white marble assumed a central role in the formation of European and Western art- and cultural history reaching far beyond the boundaries of antiquity. As a material signifying cultural prestige, white marble became a popular material for building and decorative projects, and the Imperial powers of Europe established new quarry facilities all over the world. These growing marble networks circulated white stones in far-reaching patterns of distribution from central Europe to the USA and from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. Moving large quantities of solid stone requires a complex infrastructure, developed and maintained to support the increasing consumption. Yet scholars of art history and architectural studies have traditionally addressed white marble through the lens of aesthetics, leaving its omnipresence and global condition largely unexplored.
This seminar explores the distribution patterns of white marble, with particular emphasis on the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, but with perspectives on antiquity. Framing white marble as both a local and global phenomenon, the seminar shifts focus from the traditional emphasis on artists and their materials towards unseen networks of quarry owners, extractors and trading agents. In doing so, the seminar probes questions related to how quarries have been organized through time and the role played by marble consortiums, associations and federations, who have regulated labour, transportation, and distribution over time. The seminar thus targets patterns of distribution, such as trading routes by land and sea, and the technical improvements realized over time, bringing scholars together to discuss how to gather and share data on the extraction and circulation of marble to lay the first foundations for a future global archive of white marble distribution for this period. Please note that registration is required for attendance.
Organized by Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab / Amalie Skovmøller. In collaboration with Ariane Varela Braga / UNED, Madrid
p r o g r a m m e
9.30 Registration and coffee
10.00 Welcome by Amalie Skovmøller and Ariane Varela Braga
10:15 Morning Talks
• A World in Marble — Amalie Skovmøller
• Materials That Connect: The Circulation of White Marble in the Ancient Mediterranean — Alessandro Poggio
• Ancient Naxian Marble Quarries and Dedications: Documentation and Study from the 18th Century to Today — Rebecca Levitan
13.15 Afternoon Talks
• 18th-Century Norwegian Marble in Copenhagen — Kent Alstrup
• The Workshop of Antonio Caniparoli & Figli in Carrara 1850 to 1930 — Sandra Beresford
• Reading into Greenland Marble: ‘A Noble Danish Material’ — Jonathan Foote
• Marble for the Duce: The Networks of Agents, Merchants, and Marble Workers at Foro Mussolini — Ariane Varela Braga
• The ‘Archivi del Marmor Project (AMP)’ — Cristiana Barandoni and Luca Borghini
16.15 Final discussion
The Burlington Magazine, March 2025
The long 18th century in the March issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 167 (March 2025)
Cover of The Burlington Magazine with a recent acquisition at The Met: Longcase equation regulator, clockmaker: Ferdinand Berthoud, case maker: Balthazar Lieutaud, ca. 1752 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016.28a–e).
e d i t o r i a l
• “A Frick Renaissance,” p. 203–05.
On 17th April 2025 the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue re-opens after a long period of redevelopment. When an old friend has a face lift, the results can be disconcerting. Happily, the impact here is, however, reassuringly subtle—as the splendid Gilded-age character of one of New York’s iconic cultural institutions has been retained, while elegant new facilities have been deftly integrated.
a r t i c l e s
• Julia Seimon, “Two Boys with a Bladder in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Joseph Wright of Derby’s Early Candlelights,” pp. 242–57.
A careful re-assessment of Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of Two Boys with a Bladder in the Getty’s collection, supported by documentary discoveries, clarifies the circumstances of the painting’s creation and first exhibition and has significant implications for dating several of the artist’s other painted and drawn works.
s h o r t e r n o t i c e s
• Oliver Fairclough, “Paul Sandby and Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn Revisited,” pp. 258–61.
• Christina Milton O’Connell, “Observations about the Abandoned Portrait beneath Gainsborough’s Blue Boy,” pp. 26–65.
r e v i e w s
Cover of Être sculpteur à Florence au temps des derniers Médicis, featuring a photograph of Giovanni Battista Foggini’s Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1675, marble (Saint Petersburg: Hermitage).
• Nicola Ciarlo, Review of Kira d’Alburquerque, Être sculpteur à Florence au temps des derniers Médicis (CTHS, 2023), pp. 292–94.
• Adam Bowett, Review of Stephen Jackson, Scottish Furniture 1500–1914 (NMS Publishing, 2024), pp. 296–98.
• Penelope Curtis, Review of the exhibition catalogue Souvenirs de jeunesse: Entrer aux Beaux-Arts de Paris 1780–1980, edited by Alice Thomine-Berrada (Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2024), pp. 298–99.
• Alan Powers, Review of Edward McParland, The Language of Architectural Classicism: From Looking to Seeing (Lund Humphries Publishers, 2025), pp. 299–300.
• Max Marmor, Review of Julius von Schlosser, The Literature of Art: A Manual for Source Work in the History of Early Modern European Art Theory, translated by Karl Johns (Ariadne Press, 2023), p. 303.
s u p p l e m e n t
• Sarah Lawrence, “Recent Acquisitions (2014–24) of European Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” pp. 305–24.
New Book | Giovanni Battista Maini (1690–1752)
Distributed by Yale UP:
Jennifer Montagu, Giovanni Battista Maini (1690–1752) and Roman Sculpture of His Time (London: Burlington Press, 2025), 302 pages, ISBN: 978-1916237858, $125.
Giovanni Battista Maini is one of the most important and accomplished—although least known and appreciated—of late Baroque sculptors. This new monograph provides an authoritative, scholarly, and beautifully illustrated survey of all his principal commissions. Maini was born in Lombardy and had moved to Rome by 1710. His prestigious projects in the city included the funerary monument for Pope Innocent X in Sant’Agnese in Agone and the two majestic tombs in the family chapel of Pope Clement XII in San Giovanni in Laterano. Maini also worked in Santa Maria Maggiore and was involved in the design for the iconic Fontana di Trevi. These works are set in the context of the Roman art scene: the struggle for commissions, payment, and reputation.
Jennifer Montagu is a distinguished art historian who specialises in Roman Baroque sculpture. Her monograph on Alessandro Algardi was published in 1985 to great acclaim. Montagu worked as Curator of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, London, and has been both the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and the Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She has also served as a Trustee of the Wallace Collection and British Museum, London, and is an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
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