Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Church Monuments Essay Prize
Submissions due by 31 December 2020

The Council of the Church Monuments Society offers a biennial prize of £500 called the Church Monuments Essay Prize, to be awarded with a certificate for the best essay submitted in the relevant year along with publication of the winning essay in the peer-reviewed international annual CMS journal Church Monuments. The competition is open only to those who have not previously published an article in Church Monuments. The subject of the essay must be an aspect of church monuments—of any period in Britain or abroad. The length, including notes, shall not exceed 10,000 words and a maximum of 10 illustrations, preferably in colour. The prize will be awarded only if the essay is considered by the judges to be of sufficiently high standard to merit publication in Church Monuments. The closing date for new entries is 31 December 2020. For a copy of the rules and the contributor guidelines, please see the Society’s website, or contact the Hon. Journal Editors for more details or advice on the suitability of a particular topic. For details and for submission of articles, please email the editors: Jonathan Trigg (jrtrigg@liverpool.ac.uk) and Ann Adams (cmsed.aja@gmail.com).

Church Monuments Society
Patron HRH Duke of Gloucester KG GCVO
Registered Charity 279597

Postponed: It is with regret that we have decided to postpone the Antiquities, the Art Market and Collecting in Britain and Italy in the 18th Century conference at Birkbeck this year (17–18 September 2020), due to the ongoing Covid-19 health crisis. Given the current limitations on travel and the closure of university campuses, research institutions, libraries, archives and collections, as well as the obvious challenges to personal safety, the conference will not take place this year. It will instead be held on 16–17 September 2021. The Call for Papers is therefore temporarily closed. To all who have submitted abstracts so far, thank you very much for your interest; we hope that you will consider submitting an abstract again when the Call for Papers is reissued closer to the new deadline. Note added 24 March 2020.

From ArtHist.net:

Antiquities, the Art Market, and Collecting in Britain and Italy in the 18th Century
Birkbeck, University of London, 17–18 September 2020

Organized by Caroline Barron, Catharine Edwards, and Kate Retford

Proposals due by 15 April 2020

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the formation and display of country house collections of art and antiquities in Britain, and particularly those created as a result of a Grand Tour to Italy in the eighteenth century. From The English Prize at the Ashmolean Museum in 2012 and the collaboration between Houghton Hall and The Hermitage State Museum, Houghton Revisited, in 2013, to The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection in 2018, curators and academics have sought to investigate the antiquities, paintings and collectibles that were brought to Britain in such large quantities.

However, the organisation of the art market at that time has received less attention, and far less than it deserves given its fundamental role in the processes by which objects arrived in collections at that time. New contexts for collecting have also emerged, such as the history of consumption and the economic background to the acquisition of so-called ‘luxury’ goods and prestige objects. The art market of the eighteenth century continues to play a vital role in collecting today; with so many of the objects acquired during a Grand Tour since dispersed in house sales and auctions, or bequeathed or sold to museums. The antiquities and paintings that once adorned the galleries of the cultured in Britain are also still to be found for sale, indicating the longevity of their appeal and value for collectors.

This conference seeks to explore the processes by which these collections were formed, interrogating the relationship between the Italian and British art markets of the eighteenth century, the role of the dealers in Italy, and the auction houses in Britain, through which many of the objects were later to pass, encompassing in depth discussion of the objects themselves. We invite abstracts of no more than 500 words for 30 minute papers to be submitted to the organising committee by 15th April 2020 (antiquitiesartmarketconference@gmail.com) as well as a short CV. We welcome proposals from scholars working in museums, collections, and archives, as well as from academics from across disciplines such as History, Art History, Museum Studies, and Classics. PhD students and ECRs are particularly encouraged to submit abstracts.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Dealers in antiquities between Rome and Britain
• Auctions and auction houses in Britain
• Object biographies of antiquities, old master paintings, modern paintings, rare books, prints, and neo-classical sculpture circulating in the 18th-century art market
• Customers and collectors in the 18th century
• Networks and communities of dealers and collectors
• The economic history of the art market
• The afterlife of collections from the 18th century to today

From ArtHist.net:

Angelica Kauffman Study Day
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 16 September 2020

Proposals due by 15 April 2020

On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to Angelica Kauffman taking place in Düsseldorf and London in 2020, the Royal Academy of Arts is organising a study day on the artist on Wednesday, 16 September 2020.

A child prodigy and a respected painter famous all over Europe in her own lifetime, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) transcended many boundaries and conventions linked to eighteenth-century social norms. She embraced many facets of the Enlightenment beliefs, pursued a career to become a history painter following the neoclassical ideals, and worked for some of the most prominent patrons of the time. She was also one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. At her death, her sculpted bust was placed next to Raphael’s in the Pantheon in Rome thereby underlining her place in the artistic canon.

We welcome papers exploring the rich and versatile career of Angelica Kauffman with a fresh contextualisation in the broader artistic, cultural, social, and economic fabric of the eighteenth century. Topics should draw on Kauffman’s production and career and may include, but are not necessarily limited to:
• Fashion and costume
• The business of art (showroom, records, book-keeping, and clientele)
• Cosmopolitan networks
• International career
• Women patrons
• Royal patrons
• Women artists and their careers
• Artistic/Intellectual friendships and their impact on creativity
• Multiples (prints, designs for decorative arts)
• Female self-portrait and self-representation
• Display in 18th-century European art

Please send an abstract of 300 words and a short biography of 200 words to: Marie.Tavinor@royalacademy.org.uk and Will.Iron@royalacademy.org.uk. We are sorry that we cannot offer any travel bursaries on this occasion.

From ArtHist.net:

Revivals in the Decorative Arts — Annual ICOM / ICDAD Conference
National Palace of Ajuda, Lisbon, 14–16 October 2020

Proposals due by 15 April 2020

The 2020 Annual Conference and General Assembly of ICOM International Committee for Museums and Collections of Decorative Arts and Design will take place at the National Palace of Ajuda in Lisbon, Portugal, from October 14 to 16—plus two days (17–18 October) for the post conference tour to Coimbra and Porto.

Revivals—as a socio-cultural phenomenon recurrent throughout history—seek to rescue principles and traditions of times gone by. In this conference we approach revivals with regard to decorative arts and design. Decorative arts and design are to be interpreted as any domestic or public furnishings including but not limited to textiles, silverware, furniture, wallpaper, tableware, interior decoration as a whole, graphic design, as well as personal accessories (excluding fashion). We also welcome presentations on revivals within decorative and applied art traditions (ceramics, lacquer, metalwork, textiles, woodwork, etc.) made for utilitarian or connoisseurial purposes. Hence we encourage papers proposals on a wide variety of topics including a broad array of Asian, European, or North and South American revival styles. We also include the retro design styles of the 20th and 21st centuries, referring to the resurgence of old yet relatively recent styles.

It is fascinating how heritage is being used and valued, reconsidered both from the positions of a curator, artist, or a designer. We are interested in the examples, phenomena, and notions that reflect upon the relation to the past, treating it with both unsentimental and sentimental nostalgia, introducing ways of dealing with the recent past from different periods in history.

15-minute presentations (in English) will comprise the conference sessions. Please send an abstract of 250–300 words, including your name, title, institution, and ICOM membership number to Maria José Gaivão Tavares, Curator of the Furniture Collection at National Palace of Ajuda and ICDAD Secretary, icdad.secretariat@gmail.com. Additional information is available here.

From The Georgian Group:

2020 Georgian Group Symposium: Georgian London Revisited
Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London, 7 November 2020

Proposals due by 20 March 2020

The Georgian Group is organising a day-long symposium on ‘Georgian London Revisited’, to be held at the Society of Antiquaries at Burlington House, London, on Saturday, 7 November 2020. Following the successful conferences run by the Group in previous years on Women and Architecture, and on the architecture of James Gibbs and the Adam brothers, the symposium will highlight changing perspectives and new research on the architecture of London during the ‘long 18th century’ (c.1660–1830) undertaken since the publication of the 1988 edition of Sir John Summerson’s seminal Georgian London (reissued with amendments by Sir Howard Colvin, 2003). Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Housing and estate development
• Public and commercial buildings
• ‘Improvement’: infrastructure, streets, open spaces, bridges, etc
• Places of entertainment

With this in mind, proposals are invited for 15-minute papers based on original research. Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words and a copy of your CV to Dr Geoffrey Tyack (education@georgiangroup.org.uk) by 20 March 2020. Any questions regarding the symposium should be sent to the same address. Further details will be made available, and tickets will go on sale, in the Spring.

From ArtHist.net:

The Cultural Dimension of Dutch Overseas Expansion
Utrecht University, 28 August 2020

Proposals due by 15 March 2020

“It is only money and not knowledge that our people are seeking [in the East Indies], which is to be lamented”, complained the Amsterdam mayor and VOC governor, Nicolaes Witsen, in 1712. The Dutch trading companies may have been associated with various qualities, but an interest in culture was not one of them. None of the VOC officials even noted the presence of the world’s biggest Buddhist temple, the Borobudur, on the island of Java, leaving its re-discovery to the British in 1814. No Dutch writer tried to emulate the epic celebration of the Portuguese maritime empire by Luís de Camões. Dutch expansion had an obvious impact on the sciences and medicine, as demonstrated in Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (2007). But what, if any, was its impact on culture and the humanities?

Here there is, in fact, a fruitful scholarly field that largely remains to be explored. For example, Dutch lust for money set in motion the first transfer of culture on a truly global scale, when 40 million pieces of Chinese porcelain were shipped from East Asia to Europe and the Americas. ‘Indies shops’ in different Dutch cities sold curiosities from six continents. Travelogues—even when ordered by the VOC and predominantly mercantile in outlook—offered a wealth of ethnographic knowledge for the attentive reader. Scholarly-minded individuals could break the commercial pattern, resulting in the first Western translations of a work in Sanskrit (by Abraham Rogerius, 1651), a work of Hindu iconography (by Philips Angel, 1657), and the main work of Confucius (by Pieter van Hoorn, 1675). They must have relied on the expertise of local native speakers; non-Western perspectives come into even clearer focus with at least three Chinese men who visited the Netherlands and with the Africans who sat for Amsterdam painters.

This conference brings together historians of culture, art, literature, language, philosophy, science, and religion to arrive at a fuller picture of the cultural dimensions of Dutch overseas expansion. The keynote lectures will be given by Dr. Roelof van Gelder and Dr. Mariana Françozo (Leiden University).

Possible themes include:
• Cultural topics (art, literature, language, music, mythology, religion) addressed in travelogues
• Non-Western themes in Dutch literature and drama (from ‘Moortje’ to ‘Zungchin’)
• Representations of the world’s peoples, including enslaved persons and non-Western visitors to the Low Countries
• Trade, consumption, interpretation, and imitation of non-Western material culture
• Translations, dictionaries, and grammars
• Cultural industries (print shops, painting studios, artisan’s workshops) established overseas
• Cultural education in the context of the VOC and WIC
• The impact on culture of cross-cultural encounters, slavery, servitude, and colonialism
• Challenges posed by historiographies, religions, and philosophies from beyond Europe

Working group De Zeventiende Eeuw invites all interested in this topic to send in an abstract (max. 300 words) and curriculum (max. 100 words) for a paper (in English or Dutch) of 20 minutes. Proposals for sessions, consisting of three papers, are also welcome. Deadline for abstracts: 15 March 2020, to Jaap de Haan (j.dehaan@uu.nl).

Organizing Committee: Marjolijn Bol, Surekha Davis, Jaap de Haan, Cora van de Poppe, and Thijs Weststeijn

From ArtHist.net:

Perlego: Critical Perspectives on Image and Text
University of Oxford, 3–4 July 2020

Proposals due by 1 April 2020

From writings that explore the textuality of images to the use of images in the illumination of texts, the signifying systems of image and word rub up against one another in various ways, making the meeting of text and image a long-standing area of scholarly fascination. The PERLEGO conference takes a critical approach to text-image scholarship, bringing together early career scholars working across different disciplines to explore methodological issues arising at the interface of textual and visual analysis.

With a view to initiating productive conversations about methodology, PERLEGO seeks to draw out strands of critical approaches from across research areas, time periods, and genres, to consider how integrated approaches to image and text analysis can construct robust and polyphonic histories of meaning, production, and interpretation. Hosted in July 2020 at the University of Oxford, this two-day conference unfolds as a series of panels, roundtable discussions, keynote lectures, and a hands-on session at the Ashmolean Museum.

PERLEGO invites abstracts for critical perspectives on image and text in areas including but not limited to the following:
• Visual strategies in texts
• ‘Textual’ strategies in works of art
• The idea of ‘genre’ across text and image
• The graphic act
• Hierarchies of signification
• Disciplinary hierarchies and structures of power
• Historical reconstruction and the period eye
• Text and image in colonial and postcolonial contexts
• Museum labels and taxonomies

We welcome abstracts from researchers and practitioners working in all fields, including (but not limited to): English and Comparative Literature, Art History, Modern Languages, History, Media Studies, Design Studies, and Museum Studies. Please send a 350-word abstract and a short academic bio by 1 April 2020 to perlego2020@gmail.com.

Organisers: Rebecca Bowen (Oxford), Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford), Anna Espinola Lynn (Oxford), and Sophie Koenig (Hamburg). This Conference is generously supported by the AHRC-TORCH Graduate Fund.

From the Call for Papers, which also includes Italian and French versions:

Piranesi @300
Rome, 27–30 January 2021

Proposals due by 30 April 2020

Organized by Mario Bevilacqua and Clare Hornsby

Concluding the year celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), this conference aims to reveal new aspects of his life and works, their contexts, and critical fortune, and we are seeking proposals for a comparison of interdisciplinary themes and innovative methodologies.

Some ideas of themes that could be addressed:

Piranesi as Artist, Theorist, Entrepreneur, and Merchant
Many aspects of Piranesi’s life and work still remain in the shadows: we hope to discover new documentary data, new drawings, new interpretations, new networks.

Piranesi and History
The Mediterranean civilizations, the fall of the Empire, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Egypt, Etruria, Greece, Rome. From the fall of the Empire to the Renaissance. Piranesi and the texts of his books, the birth of archaeology, the philosophy of history in 18th-century Europe.

Piranesi: Europe, America, the World
Piranesi as ‘global’ artist. His lasting reputation – from Rome across 18th-century Europe – takes on different aspects in different European contexts: England, France, Germany, Russia – and in the more distant United States and Latin America, Australia and Japan, maintaining close yet changing relationships with art, literature, photography and cinema.

Piranesi as Architect: Monument, City, Utopia
Though constantly designing, he was the architect of only one building, S. Maria del Priorato on the Aventine hill yet Piranesi always signed himself ‘architect’. His vision of Roman architecture and of the ancient metropolis states certainties and raises concerns about the dystopian future of the global city.

Piranesi in the Global 21st Century: New Methods for New Paths of Research
We can ask questions about Piranesi in the context of contemporary scenarios. His work continues to provoke reflection, inspire new projects and interpretations.

The languages of the conference are English, Italian and French, and the event will be open to the public. We invite doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, established scholars to submit proposals for papers that contain new research or use new approaches. These will fall into two groups:
1) 15-minute presentations on one event, object, or discrete theme
2) 30-minute presentations on wider issues

Please send a 250-word CV and an abstract in English, French, or Italian of either 500 words (for a 15-minute talk) or 1000 words (for 30-minute talk); the abstract should make clear the new content of the contribution. Submissions should be sent to Piranesi300@gmail.com by April 30th 2020. We plan to offer accommodation in Rome to speakers at the conference though we are not able to assist with travel costs. We propose to publish a volume of the papers of the conference.

Supporting Institutions
Centro Studi Cultura e Immagine di Roma / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale
Istituto Centrale per la Grafica
The British School at Rome
Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis

Conference Organisers
Mario Bevilacqua and Clare Hornsby

Scientific Committee
Francesca Alberti (Académie de France à Rome), Fabio Barry (Stanford University), Mario Bevilacqua (Università degli Studi di Firenze, CSCIR), Clare Hornsby (British School at Rome), Giorgio Marini (Ministero Beni Culturali), Heather Hyde Minor (Notre Dame Rome), Susanna Pasquali (La Sapienza Roma), Frank Salmon (Cambridge University), Giovanna Scaloni (Istituto Centrale per la Grafica).