Call for Papers | Napoleon’s Legacy
From ArtHist.net:
Imperial Material: Napoleon’s Legacy in Culture, Art, and Heritage, 1821–2021
Online, 3 September 2021
Organized by Matilda Greig and Nicole Cochrane
Proposals due by 12 July 2021
Napoleon Bonaparte died exactly two hundred years ago on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He had spent the last six years of his life in exile on St Helena, removed from political and military power, in the unusual situation of being able to try to shape and preserve his own posthumous legacy. He was, in a way, phenomenally successful. Napoleon is an instantly recognisable name to this day, and despite growing efforts in recent years to critically revise his reputation and highlight his role in issues such as the reinstatement of slavery, he has largely managed to escape the same level of historical censure as other infamous military dictators. This is perhaps partly because his name has become such an adaptable brand, standing for an entire era of people, places, and events, as well as a full two centuries’ worth of art, craft, and consumer commodities. While other events marking the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death have weighed his contributions to legislative, political, and military reform, less work has been done to confront his vast material, visual, and cultural legacy.
Napoleon’s death in 1821 prompted a frenzy of creation and circulation of materials relating to him, a whirling international trade in objects, images, texts and memorabilia which has essentially never since ceased. Death masks were made, shipped to Europe, waylaid, stolen, copied, and taken around Latin America by one of his doctors. Portraits were exchanged and exhibited, caricatures continued to abound, and actors took on the mantle of the Emperor from the stage to the film set. Personal items belonging to Napoleon were gifted to friends and family, collected by his admirers, and displayed at public exhibitions around the world: his horse, the key to his room, his toothbrush. These items make national headline news to this day when they are rediscovered, are sold for monumental sums to contemporary collectors and serve as key advertising strategies for museums. Napoleonic items can be official or personal, serious or comical, luxury or disposable: the former emperor can be equally thought of as a monumental Neoclassical marvel in white marble, as Joaquin Phoenix, or as a tiny cartoon figure astride a fat pony—yet little work has so far been done to bring together these diverse cultural histories in conversation.
We therefore invite researchers of all disciplines, and museum and heritage professionals, to reflect on the enduring material and visual legacy of Napoleon, what our interpretation and use of it means for the future as well as how it affects our understanding of the past.
Possible themes for papers include:
• Napoleon in theatre, TV and film; in music; in poetry; in art, sculpture and drawing; in books, ephemera, printing, paratext
• Napoleon in exhibitions and museums: museum histories, interpretations of collections, and how objects are presented to the public, including in past, present and future events; how Napoleon is used in marketing strategies or public engagement
• Private collecting and the choices and agency of collectors, including by historians; the memorabilia trade both in the 19th century and up to today; Napoleonic tourism and the creation, looting or buying of souvenirs from significant places
• Gender, sexuality, and Napoleonic memory; involvement of women as collectors, curators, consumers
• Race and empire: critical histories and commentaries on Napoleonic representations
• Medical histories of Napoleonic objects
• Dress, fashion, appearance
• Home décor
• Religion and the macabre
• Animals and Napoleonic symbolism
• The ‘golden’ or ‘rosy’ vs. ‘black’ legend of Napoleon and ongoing critical interpretations
• Comedy and ridicule
• Romanticisation, neoclassical heroism, masculinity
• Circulation and object histories
• Re-enactment
• Public commemoration; plaques, monuments, iconoclasm
• Napoleon and antiquity
Please submit abstracts for short 15-minute papers, along with a short bio, to ImpMatWorkshop@gmail.com by 12 July 2021. (Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words.) Following the workshop, we plan to pursue the publication of selected papers as a collected edition.
Convenors
Dr Matilda Greig (Cardiff University)
Dr Nicole Cochrane (University of Exeter)
Call for Articles | Raconter / Narrative(s)
From the Call for Papers (English and French) . . .
Raconter / Narrative(s), Edited by Marine Kisiel and Matthieu Léglise
Special Issue of Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art, no. 2022 – 2
Proposals due by 1 July 2021, with completed articles due by 15 December 2021
The journal Perspective’s thematic issue 2022 – 2 will explore the relationships between narration, art and art history. From the stories that inspire images and art objects, to those (re)constituted by its viewers, to the ‘story-telling’ of art historians, this issue is intended to make use of the act of narrating as a productively destabilizing heuristic tool. Even in the absence of figured diegetic content, the image and the art object narrate, if only as witnesses of an era or practices, as vehicles of narrativity. The resulting visual narratives in turn generate other narratives: fictions or legends, scholarly articles or fanciful ramblings, dialogues between artworks or viewers’ monologues. And art historical narratives as well, given that art historians continuously recount the process performatively, with its multiple mises en abyme and comings and goings in the grey areas between fact and fiction, expression and narration, description, analysis, and projection.
The historical place of the terminology of narrative within the field of literary studies also calls for examining the relationship between a narrative in images and its possible written sources. Does representing a story in images amount to imitating the textual narrative or faithfully reproducing its dramaturgy for the eye? What are the possibilities of visual narrativity relative to those of verbal language? The debt of figurative representation to its source has prompted a variety of responses from researchers in art history, some of whom posit the primacy of the written over the visual. Here, the concept of figurative thought (Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu : l’ordre visuel du Quattrocento, Paris, Gallimard, 1967) permits a distinction between two equally valid conceptual domains, where each narrative medium has its own logic. This dialectical approach, which connects the narrative image to its cultural environment, then opens the way to multiple interactions and reformulations, in particular through orality and a dialogue between the collective imaginary, individual imaginaries, and visual culture (Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body [2001], Princeton / Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011). In methodological terms, the emergence of narratology within French literary theory in the 1970s (Gérard Genette, Figures III [1972], selections translated as Narrative Discourse, An Essay in Method, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1980) provided a body of conceptual tools for renewing the study of the internal mechanisms of the literary narrative, in particular through the distinction between histoire (story), récit (narrative text) and narration (narrating act). The possible influence, or not, of this approach on the theoretical frameworks used in art history to analyze the narrative elements of the artwork or the image merits further consideration. And the same is true for the connections between visual, linguistic, and semiotic studies.
The figured narrative calls on a wide variety of visual means for shaping and spatializing narrative content through still and moving images (analog or digital), architecture, fashion, or art objects. Each work produced—monument, dress, painting, sculpture, film, book, digital interface, art object—requires a match between the narrative in images and its medium, dimensions and volume so as to fashion its visual effectiveness and reception by judiciously condensing or expanding it. Giving visual form to the narrative is also a means of fashioning or recounting its time In sum, this issue of Perspective seeks to take into account all the narrative dimensions, specificities, and potentialities of art objects and works and explore the way(s) the narrativity of the visual is rooted in a lengthy process of legitimization and empowerment.
If the image and the art object narrate, art historians in turn continuously provide a dialogical account of this multifaceted relationship as a kind of story within the story. The history of art, rooted in the works of Giorgio Vasari and Karel van Mander (considered as its modern founders), is based on a narrative exercise, from the ekphrasis of Antiquity to the epic narratives of modernist autonomy, but also anecdotes and biographical legends. The way art historians have forged their discipline by freeing themselves from a willfully mythical literary practice and gradually adopting, fashioning, and discussing ‘scientific’ methods bears witness to a complex relationship with the narrative and narration—otherwise stated, a kind of fiction. Some recent historiographical studies have focused on the question of these close ties between the writing of history and that of fiction. Mark Ledbury, in the collective work Fictions of Art History (Williamstown, Mass., Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute / Yale University Press, 2013), Ivan Jablonka with History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences [2014] (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2018), and more recently, Myriam Métayer and Adriana Sotropa, the editors of Le récit de l’histoire de l’art. Mots et rhétoriques d’une discipline (Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, Éditions Esthétique du divers, 2017), for example, have offered fruitful insights. Is it possible to write history without telling stories? From the point of view of the images and art objects or that of the viewers, can—or should—we forego any narrative process? Can we communicate without narrating (or narrating ourselves)? If this is not the case, what epistemological conclusions can be drawn about the way we consider our practice—our writing—of art history? In the era of ‘alternative facts’ and storytelling, when the question of the relative nature of narratives is both a considerable risk and an opportunity, raising question about the making of narrative, the way that art and art history narrate (and narrate themselves), ultimately implies a return to teleological issues: what has meaning, what gives meaning, what creates meaning?
The appearance of an image, be it figurative, aniconic, material, or mental, gives rise to a story and a way of arranging it into a narrative. But does the absence of figuration signify the absence of narrative? For in the same way, the appearance of the image, be it material or mental, figurative or aniconic, gives rise to a desire to narrate. While no one will deny that the image and the narrative act go hand in hand, the precedence of one over the other remains an eternal subject of debate, as are the relaying and embedding processes that engender them, from the time of the paragone to modernist discourse predicting the end of narrative artworks. For the upcoming thematic issue, these different oppositions and complex transmission phenomena can be approached from a variety of vantage points, provided that the analysis is situated within a historiographical perspective addressing the narrative processes at work in the creation and reception of art from the origins to the present day, from symbolic Paleolithic expressions to contemporary cinema. For this reason, specific case studies bearing on iconographic analyses will not be accepted unless they raise broader critical questions.
Proposals involving one or several of the following approaches will be particularly welcome:
• Artists telling stories
• Artists telling their own stories (authorized accounts, etc.)
• Historians recounting the life of the artist (from Vasari to Ernst Kriz and Otto Kurz)
• Historians telling the story of visual narratives (iconography, iconology, interpretation, etc.)
• Synchronic narratives of art history (the ‘great’ movements, the ‘master’ narratives)
• Counter-narratives and re-narrated art historical narratives (historiography, fictionalization)
• The place and possibility of a collective and/or participatory narrative within the discipline
• The socio-political consequences and echos of art-historical narratives and counter-narratives (activism, societal debates)
Published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) since 2006, Perspective is a biannual journal which aims to bring out the diversity of current research in art history through a constantly evolving approach that is explicitly aware of itself and its own historicity and articulations. It bears witness to the historiographical debates within the field, while remaining in continuous relation with the images and works of art themselves, updating their interpretations, and thus fostering global, intra- and interdisciplinary reflection. The journal publishes scholarly texts which offer innovative perspectives on a given theme. These may be situated within a wide range, yet without ever losing sight of their larger objective: going beyond any given case study in order to interrogate the discipline, its methods, history and limitations, while relating these questions to topical issues from art history and neighboring disciplines that speak to each of us as citizens.
Perspective invites contributors to update their historiographical material and the theoretical questionings from which they draw their work, to think from and around the starting point of a precise question, an assessment that will be considered an epistemological tool rather than a goal in itself. Each article thus calls for a new approach creating links with the great societal and intellectual debates of our time. Perspective is conceived as a disciplinary crossroads aiming to encourage dialogue between art history and other fields of research, the humanities in particular, and put into action the ‘law of the good neighbor’ developed by Aby Warburg. All geographical areas, periods, and media are welcome.
Narrative(s), no. 2022 – 2
Editors: Marine Kisiel (INHA) and Matthieu Léglise (INHA)
Issue coordinated with Anne-Orange Poilpré (université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Please send your submissions (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters / 350 to 500 words, a provisional title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography of a few lines) to the editorial office (revue-perspective@inha.fr) before July 1st, 2021. Proposals will be examined by the issue’s editorial committee regardless of language (articles accepted for publication will be translated by Perspective). The authors of the pre-selected proposals will be informed of the committee’s decision by the end of July 2021. The complete articles (25,000 or 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words depending on the project) must be submitted by December 15th, 2021. These will be definitively accepted after the journal’s anonymous peer-review process.
Translated from French by Miriam Rosen
Call for Papers | New Approaches to Piranesi
The first installment of HECAA’s Zoom Event Series will feature a roundtable on Piranesi studies, moderated by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer, both affiliated with the Digital Piranesi Project at the University of South Carolina.
New Approaches to Piranesi: A Virtual Roundtable
Online, 16 July 2021
Organized by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer
Proposals due by 16 June 2021
We are seeking proposals for a virtual roundtable of lightning talks on interdisciplinary approaches to the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Recent scholarship by Heather Hyde Minor, Carolyn Yerkes, and Susan Dixon, as well as the current bestselling novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, have started to open the field of Piranesi Studies to new avenues of research and potentially wider audiences. This roundtable will consist of short presentations of 5–7 minutes followed by ample time for discussion. We hope the proposed format will encourage lively conversation and prompt new critical perspectives that will continue to broaden the interpretation of Piranesi’s works. We welcome topics that include but are not limited to eclecticism, globalism, reception, book history, biographical studies, cartography, collecting, translation, digital humanities, theater, fashion, music, archaeology, and the history of science. We are especially interested in hearing from graduate students, early-career scholars, and professionals engaged in a wide range of disciplinary fields and methods.
Please send an abstract of 150 words, a brief biography, and current contact information. Submissions should be sent to digitalpiranesi@gmail.com by Wednesday, 16 June 2021. Decisions will be sent on Friday, 18 June.
Sponsored by HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture)
Call for Papers | Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series
J. T. Smith, The Entrance of Stroud, a Village near Egham, Surry, from Twenty Rural Landscapes from Nature, 1795, etching
(London: British Museum 1860,1208.72)
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From the Mellon Centre and the British Library:
Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c. 1775–1850
Online, Paul Mellon Centre and the British Library, 2–11 November 2021
Proposals due by 1 July 2021
Organized by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone
Landscape and topographical print series proliferated in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the format seems to have enjoyed an artistic and commercial boom in this period. The British Museum, the British Library and the Yale Center for British Art hold rich collections of such series, in various formats. Some, like Turner’s Liber Studiorum (1807–19) and Constable’s English Landscape Scenery (1830–33) are extremely well known. Many others, however, have still to receive sustained and critical attention. This programme of four online seminars, to take place in the first two weeks of November 2021, is designed to look afresh at the late Georgian and early Victorian landscape print series and to stimulate new research on this important strand of graphic art.
Across the programme, we will seek to question the assumptions that are typically brought to bear on such material. Why were print series produced? Who produced them, and what was their appeal? Why did they so regularly focus on landscape and topographical subjects? What were the commercial stakes in producing prints in series? How did they work as pictorial sequences, and how did they shape contemporary artistic practice? Is it possible to interrogate the full compass of such works—how many series were initiated, how many completed, and which survive? Were particular formats and subjects specific to printmaking in Britain, and how does this compare to the production of print series in the rest of the world? Finally, what do these series tell us about the categories of artist and of landscape art in the Romantic period?
This programme of seminars, which is being convened by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone, will seek to be broad and interdisciplinary in approach. We hope to showcase new research on print culture and publishing and to present new ways of thinking about how and why the ‘big names’ of the period such as Turner, Constable, Girtin and Cotman stand out (or not) in this context. We would hope that the subject will appeal to scholars of publishing, literature, and book history, as well as to landscape art historians.
We welcome proposals for 15-minute papers that take a variety of approaches. These might offer close readings of individual sets of such prints, whether familiar or obscure. We are just as interested in approaches that look at these kinds of graphic series from a broader perspective, and that address their production, consumption and appeal within the wider realms of print publishing, print culture, publishing, antiquarianism and artistic practice. Similarly, we encourage proposals that place such series in the context of eighteenth/nineteenth-century debates about rural, regional, metropolitan and imperial identity, and in relation to recent discussions on the environment and the Anthropocene.
William Crotch, THE BRILL HILLS, from WOODPERRY, near OXFORD. Pubd. Septr. 1. 1810, by J. Girtin, Engraver, Printer & Publisher, 11, Charles Street, Soho Square (London: British Library, K.Top.35.39)
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Most of all, we encourage original, scholarly and creative approaches that allow us to see the landscape print series in new ways, and to place such work in productive dialogue with the other kinds of contemporary landscape imagery—painted, water-coloured, or drawn—with which we may now be more familiar. The British Library’s recently uploaded gallery of images from the King’s Topographical Collection may provide inspiration.
This series has been organised as part of the Paul Mellon Centre’s ‘Generation Landscape’ research project, and in collaboration with the British Library. It is convened by Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone. Presentations are planned to take place online on the afternoons of Tuesday, 2 November; Thursday, 4 November; Tuesday, 9 November; and Thursday, 11 November 2021.
To propose a paper, please email an abstract of 300 words or fewer and a 50-word biography in a single Word document to Shauna Blanchfield at sblanchfield@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by midnight on Thursday, 1 July 2021.
Call for Papers | Discovering Dalmatia VII, Travel Stories
From the Call for Papers for this conference, envisioned to include both in-person and online components:
Discovering Dalmatia VII — Travel Stories: The Grand Tour, Travellers, Itineraries, Travelogues
The Institute of Art History – The Cvito Fisković Centre in Split, 9–11 December 2021
Abstracts due by 15 July 2021
A call for papers for an international conference organized as part of a week of events in scholarship and research
Over the course of time, the aims of the journeys discussed in travel writing underwent numerous changes. This, in turn, had an impact on the creation of travel itineraries. At times, the factors driving these changes were the dominant layers of a history that travellers wished to read in a particular space, such as that of antiquity or the Middle Ages. At others, itineraries were shaped by the limits of the journeys undertaken, which over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries gradually extended ever further towards the East. Between the eastern and the western portions of the Grand Tour itinerary lies Dalmatia, a historical region through which—due to centuries of Venetian-Ottoman wars—the border between the eastern and western worlds ran. The spatial features that had a strong pull on travellers to Dalmatia, drawing them to this region to capture it in words and images, frequently remained the same; nevertheless, travellers recognised and uncovered new layers of interest within them.
The Grand Tour in Dalmatia is the central theme of this conference, but it is not the only one. In addition to inviting researchers working on travel writing, travel itineraries, and travelogues that shed light on the role that Dalmatia played as a destination for study trips, we also invite all those working on the topics of travellers-researchers and study trip itineraries. We also invite researchers undertaking comparative studies that consider various records of a particular space through a range of different media. Finally, this call for papers is also open to those working on the development of digital research tools and resources for travelogues, as well as the visualization of study trip itineraries.
We therefore invite professionals of various backgrounds, whose research addresses the topics this conference covers, to send a 250-word abstract (for a 20-minute paper) and a short CV, both in English, to discoveringdalmatia@gmail.com. The closing date is 15 July 2021.
In the light of current uncertainties, we plan to host the conference both live in Split and via online platforms to facilitate international participation. Registration will take place on the evening of the 8th of December, the closing address will take place on the 11th of December, and the hosts will organise coffee and refreshments for the conference participants during breaks. No participation fee will be charged for this conference. The organisers do not cover travel and accommodation costs. The organisers can help participants to find reasonably-priced accommodation in the historical city centre. The duration of a spoken contribution should not exceed 20 minutes. Contributions will be divided into sections according to topics. Each section will be followed by a discussion. We propose to publish a collection of papers from the conference.
Scientific Committee
• Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
• Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Colin Thom (The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London)
• Elke Katharina Wittich (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Organizing Committee
• Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
• Ana Ćurić (Institute of Art History)
• Matko Matija Marušić (Independent Researcher)
• Sarah Rengel (Independent Researcher)
• Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Call for Submissions | Metropolitan Museum Journal
Metropolitan Museum Journal 57 (2022)
Submissions due by 15 September 2021
The Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed Metropolitan Museum Journal invites submissions of original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. There are two sections: Articles and Research Notes. Articles contribute extensive and thoroughly argued scholarship. Research Notes typically present a concise, neatly bounded aspect of ongoing investigation, such as a new acquisition or attribution, or a specific, resonant finding from technical analysis. All texts must take works of art in the collection as the point of departure. Articles and Research Notes in the Journal appear both in print and online, and are accessible via MetPublications and the Journal‘s home page on the University of Chicago Press website.
The process of peer review is double-blind. Manuscripts are reviewed by the Journal Editorial Board, composed of members of the curatorial, conservation, and scientific departments, as well as scholars from the broader academic community.
The Journal offers free image services to authors of accepted contributions.
Submission guidelines are available here.
Please send materials to journalsubmissions@metmuseum.org
Questions? Write to Iris.Moon@metmuseum.org or Elizabeth.Block@metmuseum.org
Call for Papers | American Popular Graphic Arts, Yesterday and Today
From The Library Company of Philadelphia:
Collecting, Curating, and Consuming American Popular Graphic Arts Yesterday and Today
The Library Company of Philadelphia, 25 March 2022
Proposals due by 2 August 2021
A symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Imperfect History: Collecting the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin’s Public Library in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Graphic Arts Department at the Library Company of Philadelphia
In 1876, during the exhibition in Philadelphia in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the republic, Philadelphia Evening Telegram art critic John V. Sears noted, “in Philadelphia today, the scion of art culture … has taken deep root in the homes of the people … Not so cosmopolitan as New York, nor so thoroughly local in character as Boston, Philadelphia represents American institutions and the progress of American civilization more perfectly than any other of our older cities ….”
Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, Philadelphia and the country inhabit a world in which our “art culture” is influenced and inspired by rhetoric and current events challenging our perception, trust in, and inherent understanding of what we see in our daily lives, and in public and private spaces. In this climate, creators, stewards, and collectors of fine and popular art representing and documenting American civilization have begun to question and address their role in a conflicted and diverse democratic society in a tenuous condition. How can a public library founded by Benjamin Franklin and with significant holdings of historical and popular American graphic arts confront this critical period in the history of our country’s evolving democratic principles and art culture?
In response to this salient question and to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Graphic Arts Department, the Library Company will display Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin’s Public Library, September 20, 2021 – April 8, 2022. Imperfect History explores the development of the Library’s graphics art collection as it relates to historical and cultural biases within American history. The exhibition is a candid exploration of the evolution of American graphic arts curatorship and collections in one of the oldest cultural institutions in the country. The Library’s graphic arts collection, including prints, photographs, original works of art, and ephemera primarily dated between the late 18th and mid-20th-century is vital to the understanding of the nation’s complex visual history.
Collecting, Curating, and Consuming American Popular Arts Yesterday and Today continues the conversation started through Imperfect History. The symposium seeks to examine changing and innovative directions in how historical popular graphic art (i.e., art not traditionally classified as fine art, that is representative of popular culture, and/or is mass produced and consumed) is curated, interpreted, and used and understood by those who produced, viewed, and consumed it. Collecting, Curating, and Consuming asks how does historical American popular graphic art act as a mirror, bridge, and barrier in facilitating our visual conceptions of our past and present?
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that will foster broad and interdisciplinary discussions about historical American popular graphic arts collected by individuals or institutions; the evolving meaning of the term curator; (un)conscious bias in the creation, collection, and curation of popular graphic arts; and the contemporary and historicized role of the visual consumer of mass-produced art. Submissions from a wide range of scholars, practitioners, and specialists are encouraged. We seek proposals from art historians, historians, artists, curators, conservators, emerging scholars, and other voices within the humanities, arts, and cultural communities.
Possible topics might include:
• Popular graphic art collectors and/or their collections
• History and evolution of the institutional role of the curator of American graphic arts
• Visual literacy and an engaged citizenry
• Politics of art
• Digital humanities projects based on popular graphic arts collections
• Remediation projects in the description and access of visually harmful historical graphic arts in institutional collections
• Art libraries and libraries of art
• Racialized/Black/gendered/queer gaze
Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 300 words and a two-page CV or resume. Joint proposals and illustrated proposals are welcome. Please email your proposals with the subject line “IH 2022” as a Word or PDF document to epiola@librarycompany.org. Submissions should be received by Monday, August 2. Selected participants will be notified via email by early October 2022. Any questions may be directed to Erika Piola epiola@librarycompany.org.
Call for Papers | Glass in the Atlantic World
From the Call for Papers:
Glass in the Atlantic World during the Long 18th Century
59th Annual Seminar on Glass
Online, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 8–9 October 2021
Proposal due by 1 June 2021
The Corning Museum of Glass is pleased to announce its 59th Annual Seminar on Glass, presented in conjunction with the exhibition In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain during the 1700s, on view at the Museum from 22 May 2021 until 3 January 2022. For the first time, the Annual Seminar on Glass will take place virtually, on Friday, 8 October, and Saturday, 9 October 2021.
We invite sparkling minds from all backgrounds to submit abstracts for papers that offer diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives on glass in the Atlantic World during the long 18th century.
Broad topics might include:
· science, innovation, and travel
· trade networks
· architecture and interiors
· cultural reception
· beads and beadmaking
· collecting and display
· fashion and personal adornment
· colonization, enslavement, and resistance
Papers will be pre-recorded and made available to registrants before the event. Presenters will be invited to participate in one of three live panel discussions on 9 October 2021. Each moderated panel discussion will address a particular theme common to the papers in question, and will last 45 minutes with the opportunity for Q&A.
We hope that this event will offer a unique foray into the many approaches we might take in understanding glass within the time and places it was designed, made, marketed, consumed, and valued. Papers will be published in digital proceedings in early 2022.
For selected papers, we are pleased to offer an honorarium of $200, a complimentary copy of the exhibition publication In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World, and access to both days of the seminar. To submit a proposal, please send a 250-word abstract and abbreviated resume to seminar@cmog.org.
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W. Pyott after Carl Frederick van Breda, The Benevolent Effects of Abolishing Slavery, or the Planter Instructing his Negro, detail, 1792 (Yale Center for British Art, B2010.14). More information»
Important Dates for Presenters
Friday, 11 June
Selected speakers will be notified.
Friday, 25 June
Approve abstract for publication and submit short bio (150 words) with headshot. This material will be made available on the seminar webpage and through institutional social media promotions.
Monday, 6 September
Submit a 20-minute pre-recorded paper with transcript (without footnotes). Your paper will be reviewed by the panel moderators for discussion points and made available for asynchronous viewing by registrants no less than one week before the live event. We assume that speakers have the necessary software and capabilities to record their illustrated paper. However, please let us know if you require assistance and we will be happy to help. We will use your transcript to make your paper accessible through subtitles. Please indicate slide breaks.
Saturday, 9 October
Participation in one live panel discussion. Selected papers will be grouped according to common themes. Live panel discussions will be held on Saturday, October 9, and hosted by a moderator who will facilitate discussion. All panel discussions will take place live between 10am and 4pm EDT. This event will be recorded.
Monday, 22 November
Submit manuscript and 5–10 figures with permissions for publication in proceedings. Papers will be published in a digital proceedings.
Call for Papers | Celebrating the Illustrious in Europe, 1580–1750
From ArtHist.net (which includes the Call for Papers in French). . .
Celebrating the Illustrious in Europe (1580–1750): Towards a New Paradigm?
La célébration des Illustres en Europe (1580–1750) : vers un nouveau paradigme?
Lausanne, 25–26 November 2021
Proposal due by 31 May 2021
Study day organized with the support of the Conférence universitaire de Suisse occidentale, University of Lausanne
In the preface to the second volume of his Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle, avec leurs portraits au naturel (1696–1700), Charles Perrault was compelled to justify one of the choices that he and his protector, Michel Bégon, had made. He was indeed criticized for “having mixed artisans with princes and cardinals,” that is, for having given the same glory to men of very different conditions. This criticism—and the author’s response, which invokes the canonical examples of Apelles and Phidias, whose names “placed after that of Alexander himself, do not bring shame to either Alexander or his century”—suggests that Perrault’s work departed from the encomiastic tradition which developed during the sixteenth century, in the wake of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. According to this tradition, only the princes and the main servants of the state would deserve to be celebrated, and such a perspective naturally led to the exclusion of scholars, scientists and artists. Pictorial enterprises such as the Gallery of the Illustrious in the Château de Beauregard, decorated with 327 portraits around 1620, or the one in the Cardinal Palace in Paris commissioned in 1632 by Richelieu, were still part of this tradition. The same is true for engraved collections, such as the series of portraits by Thomas de Leu, or biographies of illustrious women, such as Les Harangues héroïques by Madeleine de Scudéry (1642–1644) or the Gallerie des femmes fortes by the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne (1647), both being exclusively devoted to the leaders and great heroines of ancient history.
Scholars and artists could, of course, be the subject of autonomous lives or included in series devoted exclusively to them. Thus, in the seventeenth century, following Vasari’s Vite, artists were represented in various real or fictitious ‘galleries’, ranging from Leopold de Medici’s collection of artists’ self-portraits continued by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III, to biographical collections such as Cornelis de Bie’s Gulden Cabinet van de Vry Schilder-Const (1662). However, while such undertakings do testify the elevation of the status of painters and sculptors, they remain largely distinct from the practices of celebrating great statesmen. Thus, an implicit hierarchy clearly remained strong, as the criticism of Perrault’s project suggests.
However, in the following century, Voltaire could, on the contrary, affirm that those who “excelled in the useful or the pleasant,” that is to say the scholars and the artists, were the true exempla virtuti: they were then likely to surpass in merit the military heroes, and to count among the first of the great men. How did this paradigm shift—in which Perrault’s work seems central—take place between 1580 and 1750? The France of Louis XIV a priori appears as a catalyst, because of the renewal of the modes of celebration of the royal glory and, above all, because of the institutionalization of the worlds of the arts, sciences and letters under the ministry of Colbert, a phenomenon that gave rise to the elaboration of new structured social bodies, accompanied by new types of discourses which aimed to support their legitimacy. However, like André Thevet’s Vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584) or Van Dyck’s Icones Principum Virorum (1645), some undertakings prior to Perrault’s work were already bringing together scholars, artists and statesmen on the same level. These few examples should lead us to reconsider the pivotal role hitherto attributed to the reign of Louis XIV, in order to try to retrace in greater detail the evolution of the social and intellectual conditions that allowed the emergence of new types of discourse on the Illustrious.
Until now, the historiography has mainly focused on the issues of biography in the humanist context of the sixteenth century, which largely relied on the model of Plutarch (Dubois, 2001; Eichel-Lojkine, 2001), or conversely, on the development of the cult of great men after 1750 (Bonnet, 1998; Gaehtgens and Wedekind, dir., 2009). The aim of this study day is therefore to review all the biographical productions of a period that has been little considered until now, in order to better understand how the modes of celebrating the glory of illustrious men were transformed between 1580 and 1750, both in writing and in images, by taking into account various media such as books, prints, paintings, sculptures and even medals.
In addition to case studies, transversal proposals are encouraged, especially when they can be inscribed in one or more of the following themes, which do not exhaust the field of possibilities :
• The ideological, political or social aims of the constitution of ‘galleries’ of illustrious men and women
• The criteria for elevating the individual to the rank of an illustrious man or woman
• The modes of conception of projects of painted, sculpted, or engraved series of illustrious men and women and their actors (sponsors, artists, dedicatees)
• The practices of consumption of the different types of biographical series
• The place of women between ‘galleries of illustrious’ and ‘galleries of beauties’
• The criteria used by biographers to justify the writing of the eulogy of categories that were little represented before the seventeenth century, in particular artists, craftsmen, or scholars
• The impact of socio-epistemic transformations of scientific practices on the writing of biographies of natural philosophers and scholars
Papers may be presented in French or in English. Each paper will last a maximum of 30 minutes and will be followed by 15 minutes of discussion. Proposals of 300 words, accompanied by a brief curriculum vitae and a list of publications, should be sent before 31 May 2021 to Antoine Gallay (antoine.gallay@unige.ch). Depending on the evolution of the health situation, the study day may be held, in part or entirely, online.
Organizers
• Antoine Gallay (University of Geneva, Paris-Nanterre University)
• Carla Julie (University of Lausanne)
• Matthieu Lett (University of Burgundy/LIR3S)
Scientific Committee
• Jan Blanc (University of Geneva)
• Estelle Doudet (University of Lausanne)
• Christian Michel (University of Lausanne)
• Frédéric Tinguely (University of Geneva)
Selected Bibliography
• Barbe, Jean-Paul et Pigeaud, Jackie, Le culte des grands hommes au XVIIIe siècle, (Nantes, 1998).
• Bell, David A., The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800, (Cambridge: MA, 2003).
• Bonnet, Jean-Claude, Naissance du Panthéon : essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris, 1998).
• Chaigne-Legouy, Marion et Salamon, Anne, “Les hommes illustres : introduction,” Questes: Revue pluridisciplinaire d’études médiévales 17 (2009): 5–23.
• Civil, Pierre, “Culture et histoire : galerie de portraits et ‘hommes illustres’ dans l’Espagne de la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 26.2 (1990): 5–32.
• Costamagna, Philippe, “La constitution de la collection de portraits d’hommes illustres de Paolo Giovio et l’invention de la galerie historique,” in Mœnch, Esther, Primitifs italiens : le vrai, le faux, la fortune critique (Milan, 2012), 167–75.
• Culpin, David J., “Introduction” in Perrault, Charles, Les hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle : avec leurs portraits au naturel (Tübingen, 2003).
Denk Claudia, Artiste, citoyen et philosophe : der Künstler und sein Bildnis im Zeitalter der französischen Aufklärung (Munich, 1998).
• Dubois, Claude-Gilbert, “L’individu comme moteur historiographique : formes de la biographie dans la période 1560–1600,” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle 19.1 (2001): 83–105.
• Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia, Le Siècle des Grands Hommes. Les recueils de Vies d’hommes illustres avec portraits du XVIe siècle (Louvain, 2001).
• Gaukroger, Stephen, “The Académie des Sciences and the Republic of Letters: Fontenelle’s Role in the Shaping of a New Natural‐Philosophical Persona, 1699–1734,” Intellectual History Review 18.3 (2008): 385–402.
• Gaehtgens, Thomas W. et Wedekind, Gregor [dir.], Le culte des grands hommes, 1750–1850 (Paris, 2009).
• Lhopiteau, Simon, “Les Tableaux Historiques (1652) de Pierre Daret, une entreprise audacieuse de célébration des grands hommes,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (2009): 29–43.
• Michel, Christian, “Des Vite de Bellori à l’Abrégé de la vie des Peintres de Roger de Piles : un changement de perspective,” Studiolo 5 (2007): 193–201.
• Miller, Peter N., “The ‘Man of Learning’ Defended: Seventeenth-Century Biographies of Scholars and an Early Modern Ideal of Excellence”, in Coleman, Patrick J. [et al.], Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge, 2000), 39–62.
Call for Articles | Picturing Sensory Experiences
Giuseppe Maria Mitelli after Augostino Mitelli, Vedere (Sight), ca. 1700, etching, 21 × 29 cm
(Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-2013-27-1)
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From the Call for Articles:
Picturing Sensory Experiences / Figurations du sentir / Figurazioni del sentire
Special Issue of Images Re-vues, edited by Marta Battisti, Viktoria von Hoffmann, and Érika Wicky
Proposals due by 30 June 2021, with finished articles due by 1 February 2022
This special issue of the journal Images Re-vues explores various approaches to picturing sensory experiences. The aim is to interrogate both the visual representations of sensory perceptions and the sensory experiences shaped by the creation and reception of such images. The proposed contributions will build on the vibrant interdisciplinary research carried out in sensory studies in recent decades.
The history of the senses and the history of visual cultures both emerged in the 1980s, with the latter examining both the history of sight and works meant to be apprehended visually. Crossing these approaches, several works—building on the seminal research from the medievalist Carl Nordenfalk (1976)—have been devoted to the iconography of the five senses, thus including images among the materials of histories of sensory cultures. These pioneering studies, which include the catalogue of the exhibition Immagini del sentire: i cinque sensi nell’arte (Ferino-Pagden, 1996), have identified the allegories and symbols associated with the senses in visual cultures. For example, representations of the—most often Aristotelian—sensorium can be seen in Floris and Cort (The Five Senses, 1561), Brueghel the Elder and Rubens (Allegories of the Five Senses, 1617), and vast Renaissance collections of emblems. In these and other images, it is frequent to find sight pictured by a mirror, hearing represented in the form of a deer or a musical instrument, whereas flowers were a known symbol of smell, in the same way that monkeys and food symbolised taste. Touch could be alluded to by the depiction of contact with fabric, for example, and its finesse was characteristically suggested by the figure of the spider. Previous studies that have explored these issues have also highlighted the functions attributed to each sense and provided descriptions relating to the functioning of sensory organs.
Drawing on these works as well as more recent developments in the field inspired by the fruitful dialogue between sensory history and the history of emotions (Bodicce and Smith, 2020), this special issue proposes to study practices of picturing the senses as a window into the sensory experiences of the past. Rather than exploring the symbols representing the senses, we wish to consider how visual depictions of sensory perception intersect with the sensory experiences that come into play during the creation and reception of artistic and scientific imagery. Analysing how sensory perception, an invisible practice experienced in the present, could manifest in visual depictions will lead us to pay attention to bodily gestures and technological devices (such as the acoustic horn or the eyeglass) connected with sensory experience and its depiction. This perspective could also be enriched by considerations of sensory deprivation stemming from disability studies.
We will also consider the interplay between practices of creation—the senses of the maker—and the sensory experience depicted in the image, attempting to capture the resonances from one to the other. Likewise, the reception (and reactions of disgust, laughter, pleasure) by the viewer of the image will also be examined to evaluate the mobilisation, at the imaginative level, of the viewer’s senses. Considering the visual representations of the senses as sensory experiences of the world will lead us to discuss the implicit intersensory nature of visual representations of the senses, as we will consider both the production and consumption of images. In a word: our collective inquiry will question the esthesic dimension (< aesthesis, sensation) of picturing sensory experiences (Boutaud, 2012).
A global approach to the visual depictions of sensory perception will provide a fresh understanding of practices and knowledge related to sensory experience and the sensory models that have governed human relationships with the surrounding world. The consideration of different visual artistic media (e.g., paintings, engravings, drawings, sculptures) and of a wide variety of cultural fields (e.g., arts, natural sciences, medicine, gastronomy, music, religion) will help us interrogate the functions of these representations and their contribution to an aestheticisation, objectivation, or reflection about the nature of sensory experience. The absence of chronological and geographical boundaries will allow us to explore the diversity of answers to these questions and perhaps to develop a comparative approach interrogating multiple ways of picturing the senses.
Avenues of research that can be explored include but are not limited to:
• The artistic, religious, economic, philosophical, and political contexts informing the representations of sensory perceptions, as well as issues connected with the social, gendered, and racialised characterisation of the subjects of these representations.
• The intersection between hierarchies of the senses and the arts. Sample questions include whether the lower senses were natural subjects for artistic genres considered inferior, such as caricature? Alternately, did such representations require an allegorical detour?
• Which visual strategies could be employed to depict the intensity or deprivation of sensory perceptions?
• The visual representations of sensory imaginaries beyond the five senses of the sensorium defined by Aristotle. Pre-Hispanic (Cruz Riviera, 2019) and medieval Islamic art (Le Maguer, 2013) invite other examples and analyses of sensory experiences.
• The commonplace sensory imagination in a given culture and period, such as, for example, representations of anatomical dissections and banquets in the Renaissance, or the end-of-century representations of young girls dreamily smelling a flower.
• Visual depictions of sensory experiences offered by different conventional systems escaping the usual representational codes shaping the visual arts, like sensory maps and visualisations of brain activity.
Proposals for articles (750 words maximum) in French, English, or Italian describing the research questions and the corpus of sources should be sent to Marta Battisti, Viktoria von Hoffmann and Érika Wicky by June 30th, 2021. Articles (30,000–60,000 characters) will be expected by February 1st, 2022. Per journal policies, each article will be subject to a double-blind peer review by the editorial committee and the scientific committee of Images Re-vues.
Bibliography
• P. Beusen, S. Ebert-Schifferer, and E. Mai, eds., L’Art Gourmand (Brussels: Crédit Communal, 1996).
• Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• R. Bösel, M. G. Di Monte, Michele Di Monte, S. Ebert-Schifferer, eds., L’arte e i linguaggi della percezione: L’eredità di Sir Ernst H. Gombrich (Milan: Electa, 2004).
• Jean-Jacques Boutaud, « L’esthésique et l’esthétique: La figuration de la saveur comme artification du culinaire », Sociétés & Représentations 34 (2012): 85–97.
• Mark Bradley, « The Artistry of Bodies, Stages, and Cities in the Greco-Roman World », A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
• Christina Bradstreet, Scented Visions: Smell in Nineteenth-Century Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021).
• Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998).
• Sarah Cohen, « Experiencing the Arts in the Age of Sensibility », A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
• Riviera Cruz and Amelia Sandra, « La representación y función dinámica del sonido en los mitos mesoamericanos », La dimensión sensorial de la cultura: Diez contribuciones al estudio de los sentidos en México (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2019), 145–72.
• Julia Csergo and Frédérique Desbuissons, eds., Le cuisinier et l’art: Art du cuisinier et cuisine d’artiste, XVIe–XXIe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions de l’institut national d’histoire de l’art / Menu Fretin, 2018).
• Henri De Riedmatten, Nicolas Galley, Jean-François Corpataux, and Valentin Nussbaum, eds., Senses of Sight: Towards a Multisensorial Approach of the Image: Essays in Honour of Victor Stoichita (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2015).
• Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, ed., Immagini del sentire: i cinque sensi nell’arte (Milan: Leonardo Arte, 1996)
• Caroline Fowler, Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016).
• Florence Gétreau, Voir la musique (Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2017).
• Adeline Grand-Clément, Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel, and Fritz Blakolmer, eds., Les traces du sensible: pour une histoire des sens dans les sociétés anciennes, Trivium, 27 (2017).
• Martial Guédron, Temenuzhka Dimova, and Mylène Mistre-Schaal, eds., L’emprise des sens: de la fin du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Hazan, 2016).
• Sterenn Le Maguer, « De l’autel à encens au brûle-parfum: héritage des formes, évolution des usages », Archéo.doct 5 (2013): 183–200.
• Wolfgang Neiser, Audition in der Kunst der italienischen Renaissance (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2015).
• Mylène Mistre-Schaal, « Sniffing: The Figuration of Olfactory Attraction in Eighteenth-Century European Art», De Achttiende Eeuw 48 (2016): 127–43.
• Carl Nordenfalk, « Les cinq sens dans l’art du Moyen-Âge », Revue de l’art 34 (1976): 17–28.
• Eric Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2014).
• François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2010).
• Denys Riout, « Art et olfaction: des évocations visuelles à une présence réelle », Cahiers du MNAM 116 (été 2011): 84–109.
• Alice Sanger and Sive Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, eds., Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
• David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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