Enfilade

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).

From ArtHist.net (18 February 2020). . .

Giants and Dwarfs in Early Modern Europe: Real, Imagined, Metaphorical
Volume edited by Robin O’Bryan and Felicia Else

Abstracts due by 30 May 2020

Nourished by biblical accounts, classical precedents, and medieval traditions, the cultural interest in giants and dwarfs came of age in the early modern period. In the popular realm, the two were often to be found in carnivals, fairs, and religious festivals, the role of giants enacted by effigies or people wearing stilts. Dwarfs especially became important additions to the royal and princely courts, enlisted for amusement and prestige and featured in the ruler’s pageantry and protocol. In art, dwarfs were ubiquitous motifs in painting and sculpture, with giants portrayed literally or expressed metaphorically in colossi or other ‘gigantified’ works. Inspired by the Arthurian and Carolingian romances, chivalric spectacles were staged with dwarfs and giants, while burlesque poets and playwrights paid homage to the two in their mock-heroic poems and dramatic endeavors.

We seek essays for an edited volume dealing with any aspect of giants and/or dwarfs in early modern Europe. Topics might focus on their appearance in ephemeral entertainments; their exhibition in popular fairs and carnivals; as characters in legends, folkloric traditions, and dynastic histories; as leitmotifs in artistic and literary works; as embodiments of the period taste for the marvelous; and as manifestations of the Other. Please send abstracts of 200–250 words, along with any questions, to Robin O’Bryan at rlobryan@comcast.net by 30 May 2020.

From ArtHist.net:

The Art of Plaster: Between Creation and Reproduction, Study and Preservation
Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisboa / Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 6–8 July 2020

Proposals due by 10 March 2020

The «Art» of plaster has been valued by our historiography over the last few years. Indeed, it was at the end of the 20th century that the first in-depth studies on the application of plaster in architectural decoration began to emerge, and a new set of plastering artists became known and valued. However, issues concerning sculptural practice itself have been secondary until very recently, although the use of plaster as a material for artistic production has been a constant over the centuries. Because it is very easy to prepare and very malleable, it has been chosen as a material for both architectural decoration and sculpture, due to its ability to imitate other noble materials and, especially, because it is replicable if using casts.

In the artistic production field, even though they often do not represent the final work, the plaster pieces can show us the artists’ original intentions or the various studies and stages of artwork creation. Their preservation often represents the memory of the creation process itself. On the other hand, its use for making moulds easily, and later plaster casts or reproductions, has allowed the spread of three-dimensional shapes around the world, making the great works of art available to those who could never see them in their original place. In the 19th-century Academies, it became practical to exchange patterns of the great museums and collections’ main sculptures, aiming at the creation of sets of models for students’ learning. At the same time, on the architectural decoration field, one witnesses a similar phenomenon, by finding elements copied from important national and foreign monuments.

The growing importance of teaching Industrial Art has also given great importance to learning through the observation and reproduction of the great national and international artistic models, seeking the creation of a new plastic expression, based on artistic tradition. This teaching method is still common today, pursuing an ancient practice of learning for the future artists and our current students, through drawing, painting, sculpture or even copying, continue learning the basis for their future artistic development.

Although its presence in museums in the 19th century was not maintained in the following century, which gradually moved away from the idea of the Universal Museum, today, the reproductions of the great masterpieces are themselves valued objects, giving birth to large collections, which must be preserved and which have been occupying prominent places in numerous museums and art galleries in the international context. The concern for the preservation of these elements is now a vital issue. The maintenance of plaster pieces is essential, as didactic material or as a register of the artistic creation, but also because they become unique testimonies of the state of the pieces in a certain moment, or even of the existence of some works of art that disappeared over the years.

The Conservation and Restoration field has also been developing studies dedicated to these issues, not only about the knowledge of production techniques and their evolution, but also about the type of restoration performed over time. To these aspects was added the importance of the information collected through the examination and analysis methods. With the wealth of information resulting from these studies, increasingly complete and elucidative information is gathered about the state of conservation of the plaster pieces and procedures to be followed for their preservation.

Thematic Lines
• Historical Memory / Art History
• Artistic Production
• Teaching
• Preservation, Conservation and Restoration
• Another subject

Official languages: Portuguese and English

Those who are interested in participating are invited to send an abstract of up to 400 words, including title, name, affiliation and text, along with a brief curriculum summary of 50 words maximum, to aartedogesso@belasartes.ulisboa.pt by 10 March 2020. The subject of the email, as well as the file, should have the following designation: ABSTRACT – Name of the first author. Results will be released by 20 March 2020.

John Dixon Piper, Old Curiosity Shop, Bury St Edmunds, ca. 1860
(Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

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From the Call for Papers:

The Art of the Dealer: Selling Antique Ceramics
Masterpiece Fair, London, 26 June 2020

Proposals due by 1 March 2020

The French Porcelain Society is proud to announce its second study morning at the prestigious Masterpiece Fair to be held on Friday, 26th June 2020. It will focus on the pivotal role played by dealers trading in antique and second-hand ceramics in Europe and America from the 1880s to the present day in the formation of both private and public collections, in influencing taste, and furthering knowledge and scholarship. Confirmed speakers include Dr Charlotte Vignon (shortly to take up her position as director of the Cité de la céramique Sèvres), who will speak on Duveen Brothers, and John Whitehead, who will speak on the Antique Porcelain Company. The morning will conclude with a round-table discussion between leading dealers, curators, and collectors. Tickets will include entrance to the fair and participants will have the opportunity to join a tour of the ceramics stands after the study morning. Details of the programme and booking information will be announced on the society’s website.

We invite submissions for 20-minute illustrated papers on any aspect of selling antique ceramics, from the 1880s to the present. Possible topics include:
• case studies of notable dealers and the collectors they served
• the market for specific types of ceramics including Sèvres, maiolica, blue and white, Wedgwood, and oriental porcelain
• trans-national trading networks
• the role of the auction house, provenance, and price trends
• scholar dealers and the retailing of ceramics
• the role of the dealer in helping to establish museum collections
• the evolution of art and antique fairs and dealer exhibitions
• buying back Sèvres for the French Nation

Please send your submission, of no more than 300 words, together with a brief CV to: patricia.ferguson@earthlink.net; C.McCaffrey-Howarth@leeds.ac.uk; and diana_davis@hotmail.co.uk by 1 March 2020.

From the Call for Papers:

Cultivating Science in the Early Modern Garden, 16th–18th Centuries
National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, 20–21 July 2020

Organized by Denis Ribouillault and Ana Duarte Rodrigues

Proposals due by 30 April 2020

“[The knowledge of the Royal Society derived ] not onely by the hands of the Learned and profess’d philosophers; but from the Shops of Mechanicks; from the Voyages of Merchants; from the ploughs of Husbandmen; from the Sports, the Fishponds, the Parks, the Gardens of the Gentlemen.”
–Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London: J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1667), p. 72.

Although the history of early modern gardens has benefited in recent decades from an increasingly wide range of methodologies, the role played by these spaces in the development of science has been the subject of a relatively small number of inquiries. A majority of them concentrates on botanical gardens and the history of botany (Baldassari 2017), though it is now recognized that mathematics, pneumatics or astronomy found in gardens a priviledge ground for experimentation and display (Fischer et al. 2016; Ferdinand 2016).

A primary aim of this workshop is to interrogate and document what we could call (anachronistically) ‘scientific practice’ in early modern European gardens. How were gardens used to advance scientific knowledge? Examples range from the growing of medicinal plants, astronomical observation, physical experiments and so forth. Gardens were also privileged places for teaching and for debates and discussion pertaining to the various branches of natural philosophy. Furthermore, we encourage scholars to pay attention to how this function of gardens as ‘academies’, as platforms for the production and display of knowledge, as stages of scientific sociability and as pedagogical tools, affected the gardens from a formal, artistic, iconographic and hermeneutic point of view. It is not just a matter of documenting and reconstructing what happened in gardens. More precisely, it is a question of showing how what happened in gardens can lead us to a renewed understanding of the physical appearance (at a given moment) of the gardens themselves. This calls for a fruitful—yet difficult-to-achieve—intermingling of the methodologies of the history of science and of the history of art under the aegis of garden history.

• Fabrizio Baldassarri and Oana Matei, eds., Gardens as Laboratories: A History of Botanical Sciences, Journal of Early Modern Studies 6.1 (Spring 2017).
• Juliette Ferdinand, From Art to Science: Experiencing Nature in the European Garden, 1500–1700 (Treviso: Zel Edizioni, 2016).
• Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds., Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Basel, Birkhäuser, 2016).

Papers should be about 25 minutes long. Q&A and intensive discussion will follow each presentation. We intend to publish the proceedings of the workshop. Contributors’ travel and accommodation costs will be covered. Please send a proposal of 550 words max. with a title and a short bio to denis.ribouillault@umontreal.ca before April 30, 2020.

This event is sponsored by the research project led by Denis Ribouillault, Before the ‘Great Divide’: The Shared Language(s) of Art and Science in the Early Modern Period, funded by a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Insight Grant (2019–2024) and the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, University of Lisbon. The workshop will take place during the exhibition at the National Library Jardins Históricos em Portugal, organized by the Associação de Jardins Históricos and the landscape architect Teresa Andersen, with the collaboration of Ana Duarte Rodrigues, as part of the programme Lisboa Verde 2020. Visits of the exhibition and of relevant gardens and monuments are planned for the workshop participants.

Organizers : Denis Ribouillault (University of Montréal, Department of Art History) and Ana Duarte Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia).

From ArtHist.net:

Manufacturing the Past
European University at St. Petersburg, 8–10 October 2020

Proposals due by 20 April 2020

In 2018 the international conference History and Its Images, organized by the Department of Art History of the European University at St. Petersburg, was dedicated to Francis Haskell’s seminal book of the same title, which greatly influenced the study of the visualization of the past. In 2020 we will host a second conference on the representation of the past in the arts and visual culture. Among the questions to be discussed are: how the visual arts and visual culture produce images of the past, how these images were perceived by the different communities and how they were transformed by the national context of their production.

Current study of the visualization of history, the manufacturing of a collective past, rarely deals with the Islamic world, which, during over the last fifty years has been undergoing dramatic social change as new identities are constructed and the past reconsidered. We plan to have a special panel dealing with the issues of visual presentation of history in art in Islamic countries and with the role of art and architecture in this process. The conference will focus on the following interrelated panels:

Visualizing history and ideology
Propaganda and representation of history
The role of the visual arts in the invention of history
Visual art, history and the construction of national / identity

Visualizing history in the context of the historical culture
The function of historical knowledge in the artistic context
The influence of historical studies on the production of works of art
The role of works of art in the historical teaching
Images of the past and society’s conceptions of the past
Visualizing history and the question of evidence
Visualizing history and the issue of historical memory

Visualizing history in the art of Islamic countries

Visualizing history and Orientalism

We are happy to consider proposals on other themes and subjects remain relevant to the main topic of the conference.

The proposals for twenty minutes presentation should include the following information:
1. Information about participant (full name and academic status)
2. Contact information
3. Proposal (400 words)
Proposals should be sent to: visualizinghistory2020@gmail.com by 20 April 2020.

Working languages of the conference: Russian and English

Organizing committee: Ilia Dorontchenkov, Natalia Mazur, Vladimir Lapin, Anna Korndorf, Evgeniy Anisimov, Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Maria Chukcheeva

Please note that travel and accommodation expenses of the participants of the conference organizing committee are not able to cover. We are however able to give visas support for foreign participants (invitation letter).

From ArtHist.net:

Jewish Topographies: 5th International Congress on Jewish Architecture
Technische Universität Braunschweig, 21–23 September 2020

Proposals due by 27 February 2020

Bet Tfila—Research Unit for Jewish Architecture in Europe will organize the conference Jewish Topographies: 5th International Congress on Jewish Architecture at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. The conference will focus on the meaning of the term ‘Jewish topography’ (jüdische Topographie) and also on how historical phenomena can be categorized both socially and culturally. Jewish residential areas and settlements, facilities of Jewish communities (such as synagogues, cemeteries, schools, or hospitals), or locations of companies and shops can form significant topographical networks in cities and landscapes. Jewish topographies stand in a spatial and social context with corresponding places of the non-Jewish population, in which different cultural, religious, or ethnic groups find their own spaces. Conflicts and cooperations, exclusions and limitations emerge in the spatial relationships between these locations and their respective urban and architectural design reflect the possibilities and expectations of the respective and related groups.

The conference aims at examining different levels of Jewish topographies: the spectrum of possible contributions ranges from macro studies to cross-region networks of Jewish communities or Jewish institutions and people (e. g., commercial networks, Verbandsfriedhöfe (association cemeteries)), to locations and facilities of the individual communities (e. g., Judengassen (Jews Lanes), eruv, DP-Camps), to micro studies of residential areas or individual facilities and buildings. Topographies of forced housing (such as ghettos, concentration camps, and Judenhäuser (Jewish houses) may also be discussed. Religious and profane places and objects will be viewed; synchronous and diachronic perspectives will also be welcomed. The focus of the conference is on developments after the Middle Ages. However, comparative studies on earlier epochs are as welcome as general theoretical and systematic studies, e. g., on symbolic, religious, and literary topographies. Ideas on how Jewish topographies can be appropriately researched, represented, and later conveyed may also be further subjects of discussion. The conference will be held in English.

Please send your abstract (max. 2400 characters) and your CV (max. 1200 characters) including your academic affiliation by 27 February 2020, to Dipl.-Ing. Mirko Przystawik (m.przystawik@tu-bs.de).

The academic board and the organizers will decide on acceptance by 12 March 2020. The publication of selected articles in the Bet Tfila’s Series of Publications is planned. The organizers endeavor to cover travel and accommodation costs for the speakers; this depends, however, on the approval of corresponding funding applications.

For any questions, please contact
Dipl.-Ing. Mirko Przystawik, m.przystawik@tu-bs.de
Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Knufinke, u-j.knufinke@tu-bs.de