Conference | The First Public Museums, 18th–19th Centuries
From ArtHist.net:
Publics of the First Public Museums: II. Literary Discourses, 18th–19th Centuries
Durham University, 23–24 May 2024
Organized by Carla Mazzarelli and Stefano Cracolici
The workshop Publics of the First Public Museums (18th and 19th Centuries), II. Literary Discourses is an integral part of the research project Visibility Reclaimed: Experiencing Rome’s First Public Museums (1733–1870), An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective (SNSF 100016_212922). The second of three encounters, this workshop delves into the examination of literary discourses vital to understanding the experiences of early museum-goers. Travel literature has long represented a privileged source for investigating the origins of the first public museums and the practices of access to public and private collections in Europe. However, in the light of recent studies aimed at deepening the material history of the museum and the encounter of the public with the institutions, these sources deserve a closer scrutiny in both methodological and critical terms. Following the inaugural Rome session that focused on institutional sources, the Durham workshop turns its gaze towards the rich literary narratives with the aim of analysing them also in a comparative perspective with the primary sources. As museums sought to define and engage their public, literature often became both a mirror and a mould, reflecting and shaping societal perceptions. With a spotlight on interdisciplinary and transnational approaches, the Durham workshop calls for a deeper probe into the visual and material realms of museums, emphasizing the interplay between literary discourses and artworks, collections, display, space, audiences ‘narrated’ in the museum and the evolving institutional norms of the 18th and 19th centuries. Information and streaming on request: visibilityreclaimed@gmail.com.
Principal investigator
Carla Mazzarelli, Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio, Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura
Project Partners
Giovanna Capitelli, Università Roma Tre
Stefano Cracolici, Durham University
David García Cueto, Museo del Prado
Christoph Frank Università della Svizzera Italiana
Daniela Mondini, Università della Svizzera Italiana
Chiara Piva, Sapienza Università di Roma
Organising Secretary
Gaetano Cascino (Università della Svizzera italiana)
Lucia Rossi (Università della Svizzera italiana)
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9.00 Welcome by Ita MacCarthy (Durham University, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Director)
9.15 1 | Methodological Reflections
This session serves as an introduction to the workshop, providing a shared reflection on the current state of research and the future prospects. It will focus on the comparative, interdisciplinary, and intermedial analysis of literatures within the field of museum studies.
Chair: Christoph Frank (Università della Svizzera italiana)
• Carla Mazzarelli (Università della Svizzera italiana) — Letterature e pubblici del Museo: fonti o modelli?
• Stefano Cracolici (Durham University) — Musei d’Arcadia
• Marco Maggi (Università della Svizzera italiana) — ‘Tutta l’arte del buon governo trastullando imparare in un passeggio’: A Literary Rearrangement of the Duke of Savoy’s Great Gallery
11.15 2 | Museums at Hand
This session will analyse literary genres for museum visitors, like guidebooks, and the role of periodicals in broadening museum audience engagement. Discussions will cover the evolution of these texts and new reading approaches introduced by Digital Humanities.
Chair: Giovanna Capitelli (Università Roma Tre)
• Damiano Delle Fave (Sapienza Università di Roma) — Pubblici dei musei a Roma nelle guide dell’Ottocento
• Gaetano Cascino (Università della Svizzera italiana) — ‘I Romani non frequentano le gallerie di Roma’: discussioni e stereotipi sui visitatori dei musei di Roma nella stampa di secondo Ottocento
• Pietro Costantini (Università di Teramo) — Viaggio in Abruzzo: Vincenzo Bindi e I Monumenti storici ed artistici degli Abruzzi
12.30 Keynote Address
• Carole Paul (University of California, Santa Barbara) — The Museum Going Public in 18th-Century Italy
13.15 Lunch Break
14.15 3 | Museums on the Beaten Track
This session focuses on museum experiences in travel literature, including correspondence, diaries, and travel accounts. Discussions will specifically examine the unique perspectives of visitor-narrators and how published literary accounts of museum visits compare or contrast with unpublished sources.
Chair: Mauro Vincenzo Fontana (Università Roma Tre)
• Rosa Maria Giusto (Napoli, CNR) — La ‘città-museo’ e i resoconti dei viaggiatori: le Notizie di Roma scritte dal Sig.re Aless.o Galilei
• Luca Piccoli (Università della Svizzera italiana) — Reise nach Italien dell’architetto Simon-Louis Du Ry: resoconti pubblici e privati sui musei in Italia a confronto
• Ludovica Scalzo (Università Roma Tre) — ‘The torch, like Promethean fire, makes every statue live’: visite a lume di fiaccola nei musei romani dai resoconti di viaggio della prima metà dell’Ottocento
15.30 Coffee Break
15.45 4 | Varieties of Sightseeing
This session explores the variety of visiting spaces, perspectives, and geographies in the 18th and 19th centuries, including museums, monuments, private palaces, and studios. Discussions will focus on what these diverse viewpoints reveal about sociocultural dynamics.
Chair: David García Cueto (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• Daniel Crespo-Delgado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) — Los monumentos y las colecciones de arte en la literatura de viajes española (y por España) de la Ilustración
• Victoria Arzhaeva (EPHE-PSL, laboratoire Histara) — Les pensionnaires russes au Vatican: l’expérience muséale à travers la correspondence artistique et les journaux intimes du XIXe siècle
• Michele Amedei (Università di Pisa) — ‘The Studio was a monument of his intelligent taste and æsthetic
culture’: l’atelier dell’artista nei resoconti e diari di viaggio di visitatori nordamericani nella Toscana dell’Ottocento
17.00 Keynote Address
Christoph Frank (Università della Svizzera italiana) — In the Shadow of the Americas: The Humboldts and Schinkel in the Rome of the Early 1800s
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9.00 5 | Literary Landscapes
This session aims to reflect on how literature provides a multifaceted view of the museum experience, extending the analysis to landscape traversal. It will consider the poetic charm of narrative evocations that capture the emotions of a setting and the ekphrastic descriptions that articulate artworks in written words.
Chair: Ita MacCarthy (Durham University)
• Cecilia Paolini (Università di Teramo) — Il Controcanto di Clio: George Sand e l’inascoltata interpretazione del paesaggio italiano tra spazio barocco e romanticismo progressista
• Elizaveta Antashyan (Sapienza Università di Roma) — ‘A Walk through the Hermitage’: Russia’s First Public Museum and Its Reflections in Literature during the Reign of Alexander II (1855–1881)
10.00 6 | Museum Tales
This session is dedicated to literary texts that transform museum visits into narratives. It explores how notions of time and space during such visits compare with the temporal dynamics of literary narration and how the perception of the visited places differs from travel accounts.
Chair: Sara Garau (Università della Svizzera italiana)
• Lucia Rossi (Università della Svizzera italiana) — Il ‘Museo di Roma’ tra esperienza, ricordo e costruzione narrativa: I Miei Ricordi e le Lettere di Massimo d’Azeglio
• Meghan Freeman (Yale University) — The Intimacies of Art Travel in Henry James
• Corinne Pontillo (Università di Catania) — ‘S’arrestò davanti alla Gioconda’: visitare il Museo del Louvre attraverso la letteratura
11.15 Coffee Break
11.30 7 | Sensory Visits
This session explores how the concept of the museum as a space to ‘read’ differs from its traditional perception as a space to ‘visit’. It will examine, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the implications of this distinction in literary and museological discourses, with a special focus on the sensory dimension of navigating through texts and the museum.
Chair: Marco Maggi (Università della Svizzera italiana)
• Isabelle Pichet (UQTR, Trois Rivières) and Dorit Kluge (VICTORIA | International University, Berlin) — Experiencing 18th-Century Art Exhibitions in Paris and Dresden: A Sensory Interplay between Exhibition and Text
• Sofia Bollini (Università Luigi Vanvitelli, Napoli / Università della Svizzera Italiana) — Il preparato anatomico come oggetto museale e letterario nella cultura tardottocentesca
• Laura Stefanescu (Villa I Tatti, Harvard University) — Vernon Lee’s Gallery Diaries: An Aesthetic Bodily Experience of Italian Museums in the Early 20th Century
12.30 Discussion and Conclusion
Mount Vernon Symposium 2024
From Mount Vernon:
On the Eve of Independence: Art and Architecture in the British Empire
Online and in-person, The Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, 31 May — 2 June 2024
In 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, George Washington began a major expansion of his home, a building whose foundations dated to the 1730s. It was a project that he maintained throughout the war and that he continued after his triumphant return to Mount Vernon. Inspired by the work that began 250 years ago, the 2024 Mount Vernon Symposium will explore the art and architecture of the British Atlantic in the long-eighteenth century, surveying the connections between and comparisons of British and American practices in the years preceding and surrounding the American Revolution.
Speaker biographies and abstracts are available here»
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1.00 Welcome and Introductions
1.15 Afternoon Talks
• Cosmopolitan and Local in Colonial Boston: Copley’s House — Jeffrey Klee
• Britain Over the Blue Ridge: Architectural Impressions on Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — A. Nicholas Powers
• Between a Handsome Finish and Sorrowful Discouragement: Black Craftsmen and the Making of American Architecture — Tiffany Momon
• Reimagining Hemsley’s Cloverfields — Willie Graham
• George Washington’s Mount Vernon: From Revolution to Revitalization — Susan Schoelwer and Thomas Reinhart
6.30 Reception, Mansion East Lawn / Mansion Open House
7.15 Dinner, Ford Orientation Center
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9.00 Welcome and Introductions
9.15 Morning Talks
• Free versus Will: Craftspeople in Early Maryland — Brittany Luberda
• Sleuthing Out a Portrait: From Mount Vernon to the British Island of Dominica — Dorinda Evans
• Drawing the Lines of Revolution: Pastel Portraits, Boycotts, and American Independence — Megan Baker
• Disasters in the Eighteenth-Century North Atlantic: Art, Gardens, and Novel — Joseph Litts
12.15 Lunch, Founders’ Terrace
1.45 Afternoon Talks
• The Endless Round: The London Town House, Politics and Society in the 1770s — Jeremy Musson
• Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland — Adriano Aymonino
• The Transatlantic Design Network: Thomas Jefferson, John Soane, and Agents of Architectural Exchange — Danielle Willkens
5.45 Reception, Mount Vernon Wharf
7.00 Dinner, Mount Vernon Wharf
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9.30 Morning Talks
• The Irish War of Independence and Burning the Big House, 1920–21 — Terence Dooley
• Tory, Whig, Empire: The Implications of Classical Style in the Early Modern British Empire — Sarah Hutcheson
• Public Architecture and Imperial Reform on the Eve of the Revolution: Governing the British Atlantic after the Treaty of Paris — Christian Koot
• Educating the Next Generation in Historic Trades and Preservation — Markus Damwerth, Christina Butler, Joseph Zemp, and Steve Fancsali
Study Day | Collecting through the Ages
From The Wallace Collection and the conference programme:
The Wallace Collection is thrilled to announce the relaunch of the History of Collecting as Collecting Past and Present. This new series will take the format of biannual, themed study days, which will include fascinating talks from leading specialists, exploring collecting through the ages. Exclusive interviews with modern-day collectors will also feature, revealing tantalising glimpses into how exceptional objects are brought together. These will be followed by drinks receptions that will act as unique forums for discussion. For those further afield or unable to make it to the museum, the talks can be watched online. And if you are interested in taking part as a speaker at future events, calls for papers will be shared throughout the year.
Bishan Singh, The Court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), Amritsar or Lahore, 1863–64
(Toor Collection)
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Collecting through the Ages
Online and in-person, The Wallace Collection, London, 5 July 2024
The Wallace Collection and the outstanding artworks it contains were brought together through the 18th and 19th centuries by an extraordinary family of collectors—the marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard and Lady Wallace. Delve into the history of collecting across the ages at our first Collecting Past and Present event. You’ll hear from leading academics and specialists on a variety of subjects, from the collecting of Shakespearean relics to the houses of Calouste Gulbenkian. Also join us for a conversation with a leading modern-day collector of Sikh, Indian and Islamic art, Davinder Toor, who will offer exclusive insights into his passions and inspirations.
Registration is available here»
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10.15 Welcome
10.30 Verena Suchy — Women as Collectors of 18th-Century Cabinets
In the theory and history of collecting, women collectors have often been absent. Examples of noble women from different German principalities, however, indicate that in the 18th century it was common—if not necessary—for aristocratic women to assemble collections of jewellery, decorative art, and precious objects. Examining these collections with Dr Suchy will shine a light on the collecting practices of women and their political and representative functions.
11.15 Refreshments
11.45 Kirsten Tambling — Shakespearean Relics in the Royal Collection
1816 was the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, and, in this year, George, Prince Regent, ordered seven toothpick cases fashioned from ‘Shakespere’s Tree’. He was thus inserting the monarchy into a buoyant contemporary trade in Shakespearean ‘relics’. Focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries, Dr Tambling will investigate Shakespearean relics in the Royal Collection and the significance of royals collecting
Shakespeare.
12.45 Peter Humfrey — Amabel, Countess de Grey, as Collector and Curator in Post-Orléans London
Diarist, practising artist, and commentator on the political events of her time, Amabel was also a well-informed collector, both of Old Masters arriving on the London art market in the wake of the French Revolution, and of the work of her younger contemporaries. Further, she was heir to a distinguished collection of paintings from her family and was active in documenting and rehanging it. Professor Humfrey will take a closer look at this fascinating character.
13.30 Q&A
13.45 Lunch break
14.45 Barbara Bryant — Stephen T. Gooden and the Marketing of Edward Burne-Jones’s Legend of St George and the Dragon Series
In 1894, a series of seven paintings by Burne-Jones came to auction at Christie’s. Dr Bryant will consider the protracted attempts by various dealers to sell the series in the 1890s until the successful sale by the relatively new gallery owner Stephen T. Gooden. Gooden’s achievement will give an insight into how art
dealers of this period marketed the modern masters.
15.45 Vera Mariz — The Making of a House for Calouste Gulbenkian’s Art Collection
Dr Mariz will explore the various residences that housed Calouste Gulbenkian’s art collection, with a primary emphasis on 51 Avenue d’Iéna. While the acquisition process of the latter mirrors that of acquiring artworks, Gulbenkian’s satisfaction remains uncertain. Newly discovered materials and innovative approaches offer fresh interpretations of the hôtel Gulbenkian, which will be presented as an intimate testament to Gulbenkian’s essence as an art collector.
16.30 In Conversation with Davinder Toor
Two centuries ago, Punjab’s Sikh ruling elite lavishly patronised artists and craftsmen to enhance the splendour of their empire. By the mid-19th century, the Sikh empire had met its demise at the hands of the East India Company. Over the following century and a half, Sikh artefacts were dispersed across the globe. Some ended up in British institutional collections, while others were bought and sold by collectors. With Curatorial Assistant Alexander Collins, Davinder will discuss how he has pursued his passion as a collector to create a lasting legacy to the empire of the Sikhs.
17.15 Q&A
17.30 Drinks reception
Conference | Captivity: Assembling Nature’s Histories
From the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA:
Captivity: Assembling Nature’s Histories
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, 17 May 2024
Conference organized by Anna Chen, Rebecca Fenning Marschall, and Bronwen Wilson
The early modern period was a hothouse for the study of physical things in the natural world, and for the collection and assembly of them in human-made physical spaces. In other periods, botanical samples were preserved by diarists in their journals, such as Poems and Riddles written by Mary Woodyeare Tibbits (ca. 1764–1840), and Pressed specimens of butterflies and moths (1905), compiled by Yasushi Nawa (1857–1926), which are both in the Clark Library’s collections. Nawa’s lepidochromic book showcases the technique of ‘printing butterflies’, or fixing the scales of their wings onto paper. Specimens of all sorts were admired for their variegated colors, curated in collections, and assembled into books. Birds were captured in aviaries for their sounds, or killed and prepared as specimens for display, study, and scientific descriptions. Plants were transported across oceans in terraria, and contained in plots and glasshouses.
Libraries were deeply implicated in these historical pursuits of the collection and classification of the contents of the natural world, as are modern libraries that now grapple with whether and how to preserve the nature that enters their collections. The interior-exterior division of libraries is a highly regulated boundary. Libraries strive tirelessly to seal the building envelope against the environmental conditions of the outdoors, as fluctuating temperature and humidity levels, mold spores, insects, rodents and natural disasters all threaten damage to their holdings. Libraries also capture books about nature on their shelves, as flora and fauna cohabitate on their grounds. At the Clark Library, Cooper hawks nest, feral cats roam, and roots of trees probe the ground in search of water. What might we learn from these efforts to capture and to conserve nature, coupled with its potential to decompose or to invade environments?
The conference is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. No registration is required to watch the livestream. In-person registration will close on Monday, May 13 at 5.00pm. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.
p r o g r a m
9.15 Introduction — Anna Chen, Rebecca Fenning Marschall, and Bronwen Wilson (UCLA)
9.30 Panel 1 | Flight and Containment
Moderator: Rebecca Fenning Marschall (UCLA)
• Cynthia Fang (UCLA) — Containing Sound, Exhibiting Images: An Aviary at the European Palace Complex in Qing China
• V. E. Mandrij (University of Konstanz / University of Amsterdam) — The Lepidochromy Technique: Capturing Colors of Butterflies and Moths in Books and Paintings
• Jennifer Martinez Wormser (Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps College) — One Hundred Years Later: Ellen Browning Scripps and William Leon Dawson’s Birds of California (1923)
11.00 Coffee break
11:30 Panel 2 | Accretions
Moderator: Anna Chen (UCLA)
• Tori Champion (University of St. Andrews) — Material Afterlives: The Shell Craze in 18th-Century France and the Forgotten Mollusc
• Joy Zhu (UCLA) — Misinterpreting Fossil Evidence: On the Discovery of ’Dragon Fossils‘ in China, 1915–30
• Andrew Weymouth (University of Idaho) — Humanizing Nature Research History with Static Web Design
1.00 Lunch, with a display of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
2.30 Panel 3 | Unruly Collections
Moderator: Rebecca Fenning Marschall (UCLA)
• David Jones (Northwestern University) — In However Low Degree: Reframing the Role of Silverfish in Louis Fleckenstein’s Photography
• Ashley Cataldo (American Antiquarian Society) — From Weeding to Reseeding: Removing (and Restoring) Botanicals in Library Collections
• Deirdre Madeleine Smith (University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum of Natural History) — Whither ‘Papered Leps’: On Accidental Human Archives at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
4.00 Coffee break
4.30 Panel 4 | Assembling
Moderator: Bronwen Wilson (UCLA)
• Lindsay Wells (Independent Scholar) — Portrait of a Colonial Botanist: Joseph Dalton Hooker and the Visual Politics of Plant Science
• Frederico Câmara (Independent Scholar) — Views of Paradise: A Photographic Atlas of the Artificial Environments of Zoological Gardens and Aquariums in Oceania
Byron 200 Years after His Death
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) died 200 years ago on Friday (19 April). Writing this week for The Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews two new books about the poet (noted below), while Benjamin Markovits, in a New York Times essay, grapples with how (and whether) people still read him. A Byron Festival is being held at Trinity College, Cambridge (yesterday and today) while the Keats-Shelley House presents the exhibition, Byron’s Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance, along with a series of talks and other events throughout the year. Finally (for now), Liverpool UP has discounted some of its Byron books.
The Byron Festival at Trinity
Trinity College Cambridge 19–20 April 2024
Trinity College Cambridge will host a two-day festival to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death on 19 April 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece. Byron was a student at Trinity College and is one of its most celebrated alumni. While enrolled as an undergraduate, Byron published his collection of poetry, Hours of Idleness, and began the satirical poem that would become English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a scathing provocation of the literary establishment.
Described by the College’s Senior Tutor of the time as a “young man of tumultuous passions,” Byron became one of the most controversial, celebrated, and influential poets of his age. When Westminster Abbey declined to accept the magnificent statue of Byron, created after his death by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, Trinity gave it a home in the Wren Library, where the poet still stands—an impressive presence for students, scholars, and visitors.
But what kinds of presence does Byron have now? This question is the focus of an exciting programme of talks, readings, music, and exhibited work, which will address, and mediate, the legacy and status of Byron now, within the contexts of today’s culture and scholarship. The Byron Festival Conference programme includes talks about Byron, by academics and writers including Bernard Beatty, Drummond Bone, Clare Bucknell, Will Bowers, Christine Kenyon Jones, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Seamus Perry, Diego Saglia, Dan Sperrin, Jane Stabler, Fiona Stafford, A.E. Stallings, Andrew Stauffer, Corin Throsby, Clara Tuite, Ross Wilson.
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Fiona Stafford, ed., Byron’s Travels: Poems, Letters, and Journals (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2024), 728 pages, ISBN: 978-1101908426, $35.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the leading figures of British Romanticism. The Byronic hero he gave his name to—the charming, dashing, rebellious outsider—remains a powerful literary archetype. Byron was known for his unconventional character and his extravagant and flamboyant lifestyle: he had numerous scandalous love affairs, including with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his lovers, famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
His letters and journals were originally published in two volumes; this new one-volume selection includes poems and provides a vivid overview of his dramatic life arranged to reflect his travels through Scotland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Albania, Switzerland, and of course Greece, where he died. It contains a new introduction by scholar Fiona Stafford highlighting Byron’s enduring significance and the ways in which he was ahead of his time.
Fiona Stafford is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. The author of many books, including a biography of Jane Austen, she also wrote and presented the highly acclaimed The Meaning of Trees for BBC Radio 3’s The Essay. Her book The Long, Long Life of Trees, published in 2017, was a Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year.
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Andrew Stauffer, Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-1009200165, $30.
Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death, and adopting a fresh approach, it explores his life and work through some of his best, most resonant correspondence. Each chapter opens with Byron’s own voice—as if we have opened a letter from the poet himself—followed by a vivid account of the emotions and experiences that missive touches. This gripping life traces the meteoric trajectory of a poet whose brilliance shook the world and whose legacy continues to shape art and culture to this day.
Andrew M. Stauffer is a professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry.
Workshop | The Reception of the Belvedere Torso
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1, detail, 1753.
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From ArtHist.net and the Freie Universität Berlin:
Centre/Pieces: De- and Recentring the Belvedere Torso
Berlin, 25–26 April 2024
Organized by Anna Degler and Katherine Harloe
Registration due by 22 April 2024
This two-day workshop is held as a cooperation between the EXC 2020 project The Travelling Torso by Anna Degler (EXC 2020, Freie Universität Berlin) and Katherine Harloe (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study). It is dedicated to the post-antique reception of one of the most canonised and well-known antique sculptures within ‘Western’ culture, the so-called Belvedere Torso, which is kept in the Vatican Museums in Rome. Since at least the early sixteenth century, this larger-than-life marble sculpture has been the centrepiece of a classical canon. It has also at the same time always only been known in its fragmentary state, as a powerful body in pieces.
Exploring scholarly, artistic, and curatorial engagement with this centrepiece of classical Greco-Roman antiquity allows for a deeper insight into complex temporal, normative, and political reference systems that are constitutive of classical receptions. The workshop will focus on the relation of body politics and classical sculpture over the five centuries since the Torso entered the European art historical canon in order to explore the entanglements of these engagements with ideals of freedom, humanity, and gender, as well as racial and ableist discourses.
Following the research agenda of EXC 2020, the reception of the Belvedere Torso serves as one paradigmatic case study of intermediary literary and artistic practices. In the workshop we will discuss how its reception within art, literature, scholarship, and museums have produced or reproduced a variety of (political) temporalities and a set of norms. We will examine collection displays, the history of copies in plaster casts and other media, the Torso’s material transformations, and the many literary and artistic attempts at its completion, as well as comparing its reception with that of other famous antique sculptures (such as Laocoön and Venus of Milo). Invited practitioner Stephe Harrop will engage with the Torso from the perspective of contemporary storytelling with a new piece, to be performed during the workshop.
This two-day workshop—held on split sites between the Cluster Villa and the Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik in Charlottenburg—will bring together international and local guest speakers working at the interface of a variety of disciplines (classics, literary studies, art history, archaeology, and performance studies) to investigate and reflect upon the manifold temporalities and asynchronies that constitute and complicate processes of classical reception. Given the Belvedere Torso’s central position in ‘Western’ canons up until today, the workshop aims at de- and possibly recentring the Torso by self-critically exploring classical reception and canonisation as a powerful practice. The workshop hereby raises the question how those practices actively shape temporal communities. This free event will be conducted in English. Please register with anna.degler@fu-berlin.de before 22 April 2024.
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Morning at Cluster Villa, Otto-von-Simson Strasse 15
9.30 Registration
9:45 Introduction by Katherine Harloe (London, Institute of Classical Studies) and Anna Degler (Berlin, EXC 2020)
10.15 Morning Presentations
Chair: Anna Degler (Berlin)
• Elisabeth Décultot (Halle) — Winckelmann’s Invention of the Belvedere Torso: Epistemological Foundations and Strategic Interests
• Andrew James Johnston (Berlin, EXC 2020) — Making the Torso Move: The Torso Belvedere, the Uffizi Wrestlers, and Courbet
12.30 Lunch at Clustervilla
Afternoon at the Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik (Greek and Roman Plaster Cast Collection), Freie Universität, Schloss Charlottenburg
2.30 Check-in
3.00 Afternoon Presentations
• Lorenz Winkler-Horaček (Berlin) — The Belvedere Torso in Berlin: Between Display, Distribution, and Disappearance
• Stephe Harrop (Liverpool) — Storytelling Performance Speaking Stone: Broken Stories from the Belvedere Torso
• Leonard Barkan (Princeton) — If the Torso Belvedere Could Talk, What Would It Say?
6.30 Reception
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Cluster Villa, Otto-von-Simson Strasse 15
9.15 In conversation with Stephe Harrop
10.00 Morning Presentations
• Allannah Karas (Miami) — Black Artists and ‘White’ Sculptures: Reconfiguring the Classical Tradition
• Ryan Sweet (Swansea) — Prosthesis Narratives: Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness in Victorian Literature and Culture
12.15 Lunch
1.00 Afternoon Presentations
• Anna Degler (Berlin) — Modes of Thinking or Thinkers beyond Rodin: The Torso Belvedere in the United States, c. 1853–63
• Closing Discussion
Conference | Immanuel Kant and Hull
Immanuel Kant was born this month 300 years ago (April 22). From the conference registration form:
Immanuel Kant and Hull
Hull History Centre, East Yorkshire, 15 June 2024
Drinking glass engraved with the names of Immanuel Kant and four men from Hull, 1763 (Lüneburg: East Prussian State Museum).
Presented by the Georgian Society for East Yorkshire and Friends of Kant and Königsberg, in association with Hull History Centre and University of Hull Maritime History Trust
This conference commemorates the tercentenary of the birth of the most important German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and celebrates his close friendship with Joseph Green and Robert Motherby, merchants from Hull. It has been said that Green’s effect on the philosopher “cannot be overestimated.” The Königsberg firm of Green and Motherby managed Kant’s finances, and Kant had a great influence on the education of Robert Motherby’s children, one of whom, William, founded The Friends of Kant in 1805.
The fee of £30 (Georgian Society for East Yorkshire and Friends of Kant and Königsberg members £25) includes all refreshments. Book early, as places limited. Please direct questions to to Susan Neave, susananeave@gmail.com.
p r o g r a m m e
11.00 Introduction – Gerfried Horst (Chairman, Friends of Kant and Königsberg)
11.15 Morning Session
• Life and Work of Immanuel Kant – Tim Kunze (Curator, Immanuel Kant Department, East Prussian State Museum, Lüneburg)
• Königsberg Kant’s Home – Max Egremont (author of Forgotten Land: Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia)
1.00 Lunch
1.45 Afternoon Session
• Kant and Slavery – Judith Spicksley (Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull)
• Hull’s Baltic Trade – Nick Evans (School of Humanties, University of Hull)
• Hull Merchants and Immanuel Kant – David Neave (Georgian Society for East Yorkshire)
• The Motherby Family of Hull and Königsberg – Marianne Motherby (Friends of Kant and Königsberg)
4.00 Tea and Cakes
Conference | Fragile Things
From Yale’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the MacMillan Center:
Fragile Things: Material Culture and the Russian Empire
Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven, 12–13 April 2024
In February 2022, Russian forces set ablaze the Museum of History in Ivankiv, Ukraine. Locals struggled to save paintings by the celebrated folk artist Maria Primachenko, but other collections were lost: cutlery, textiles, fossils, stamps. In the museum’s burnt-out frame, metals, fibers, and bones mixed in the self-same gray of ashy heaps. Plucked from homes, factories, and workshops, these humbler objects so redolent of 19th- and 20th-century life in Ivankiv became the target of imperial erasure.
Today’s imperial violence highlights the fragility of objects like these, and urgently asks us to reconsider the frameworks by which we study the material culture of the Russian empire. How might such a landscape of endangered things resist the traditional presumptions with which we approach historical objects? In place of tactility, materiality, and presence, this conference offers a slipperier view. Objects can be hidden, stolen, destroyed. But such physical precarity belies other, intangible, mutabilities: ideologies shift, meanings elude, objects slip from our scholarly grasp. What would it mean to see material culture—and our study of it—as fragile? Fragility can be the threat of collapse or loss; it is also the gleam of volatile possibility. Where recent literary and art historical trends see matter as ‘vibrant’ or ‘powerful’, this conference proposes fragility as a model and a mood for understanding the Russian empire’s things.
In the past two decades the humanities has experienced a marked ‘material turn’, a new materialism that has brought fresh methods and theories to the study of objects. With amplified attention not only to matter itself, but to the ideological, social, economic, political, and ecological dimensions of material objects, historians and theorists of culture have imagined the deep human and environmental networks that make, shape, and mediate things. This conference will explore these materialities as defining of the Russian empire, comprised as it was not only of matryoshka nesting dolls and Faberge eggs, but of the artistic, industrial, and religious objects of the imperial peripheries, Central Asia, the Baltic region, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. How, for example, are stories of colonial expansion or class violence retained in the crumbling relics of imperial everyday life? Can we discern shifting social and political ideologies in the migration of ornamental forms across the decorative arts? In which materials might we seek inscriptions of ecological transformation and vulnerability? And how does the researcher engage materiality when objects are lost or made inaccessible by geopolitical upheaval? In asking these and other questions, Fragile Things will attend to three main goals: to propose the concept of ‘fragility’ as generative for material cultural scholars across a range of disciplines and methodologies; to explore the potential of new materialism to excavate previously overlooked objects, experiences, and frameworks of the Russian empire; and to leverage the framework of materiality in the project of decolonizing the study of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia.
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2.00 Welcome
2.15 Panel 1 | Animal Materialities
Moderator: Emily Ziffer
• Matthew Romaniello — Creation through Destruction: Animal Materials and their Afterlives in the 18th Century
• Philippe Halbert — ‘There’s no Rushia in Town’: Rethinking Russia’s Leather Empire
• Bart Pushaw — Otter Offerings: The Materials of Indigenous Insurgency in Russian-Occupied Alaska
4.30 Conference Keynote
• Michael Yonan — From Material Culture to Materiality: Conceiving Meaning for Historical Things
6.00 Reception
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9.00 Welcome
9.15 Panel 2 | Migrating Orientalisms
Moderator: John Webley
• Michael Kunichika — Ornament and Orient: Migration and the Fragility of National Identity
• Mary Roberts — The Fragile Things of Stanisław Chlebowski’s Epistolary Interiors
• Mollie Arbuthnot — Museums against Fragility: Material Heritage and Imperial Legacies in Revolutionary Turkestan
11.15 Panel 3 | Fragile Icons
Moderator: Molly Brunson
• Christine Worobec — The Ukrainian Okhtyrka/Akhtyrka Icon of the Mother of God: A Russian Imperial Project
• Wendy Salmond — The Fragile Icon
1.30 Panel 4 | Tastemaking
Moderator: Liliya Dashevski
• Margaret Samu — Fragile Clay, Firm Aspirations: A Safronov Teapot
• Karen Kettering — How ‘Russian’ Is a ‘Fabergé Egg’ and What Can They Actually Tell Us?
• Wilfried Zeisler — ‘You may rest assured that we will take the best care of them.’ – Marjorie Post to Colonel Serge Cheremeteff, 1964
3.30 Panel 5 | Peripheries Centered
Moderator: Emily Cox
• Christianna Bonin — Konstantin Korovin’s Borderline Modernism
• Ismael Biyashev — Mobile Pasts//Tethered Poetics: Archaeology, Nomadism, and Material Culture in Late Imperial Siberia
• Rosalind Blakesley — Vasily Surikov and the Precarity of Materializing History
5.15 Concluding Remarks
Conference | Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art
From ArtHist.net:
Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art
University of California, Los Angeles, 19 April 2024
Panoramic Map of the Tōkaidō Highway, Shōtei Kinsui, drawn by Kuwagata (better known as Keisai). Published by Sanoya Ichigorō, Izumiya Hanbei, and Izumoji Manjirō, n.d. (likely 1810). Polychrome xylography, 52 × 24 inches (Los Angeles: Richard C. Rudolph Collection of Japanese Maps, Special Collections, UCLA Library).
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On Friday, April 19, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA will host Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art, the third of three conferences at UCLA this year on the theme of Edo-period art. The conference is free and open to the public. If interested in attending, please do register, as space is limited in the Clark Library (also, note that the Clark is housed in a villa in West Adams, some ten miles east of the main UCLA campus in Westwood). Parking is free, and lunch is provided. To register, follow this link. While there will be no livestream or recording, an edited volume should follow.
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9.30 Coffee and Registration
10.00 Welcome and Opening Remarks
• Bronwen Wilson (UCLA) and Kristopher Kersey (UCLA)
10.15 Panel 1 | Ainu Material and Visual Cultures: History, Materiality, and Practice
Moderator: Julia H. Clark (UCLA)
• Christina M. Spiker (St. Olaf College), Carving Identity: Early Ainu Woodcarving, Cultural Revitalization, and the Patchwork of History
• Fuyubi Nakamura (The University of British Columbia), Art and Sinuye with Ainu Artist Mayunkiki
• Katsuya Hirano (UCLA), The Eye of Kelp: Ainu-Japanese Trade and the Formation of a Culinary Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
12.15 Lunch — Display of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
1.15 Panel 2 | The Circulation and Dynamism of Ryūkyūan Textiles and Lacquerware
Moderator: Kristopher Kersey (UCLA)
• Setsuko Nitta (Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts), The Dyeing in Ryūkyū: The Relationship with Overseas
• Monika Bincsik (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Lacquer Art at the Crossroads: Ryūkyū Ware
2.45 Coffee Break
3.15 Panel 3 | Ryūkyūan Painting: Heritage, Afterlives, and Restorations
Moderator: Rika Hiro (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
• Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (University of East Anglia and University of Michigan), Tracing the Artistic Heritage: The Development of Ryūkyūan Painting from the Seventeenth to the Early Eighteenth Century
• Heeyeun Kang (UCLA), Ryūkyū Royal Portraits: Restoring and Contextualizing Lost Ryūkyū Art
4.45 Break
5.00 Plenary Discussion (all speakers and moderators)
5.30 Reception
Conference | Imaging Religious Ceremonies in Early Modern Europe
From ArtHist.net:
Performing Theatricality and Imaging Religious Ceremonies in Early Modern Western Europe
Centre for Architecture and Art, Ghent University, Vandenhove, 15–17 May 2024
Registration due by 8 May 2024
Bernard Picard, Le Bairam ou la Paque des Mahometans (The Bairam or the Passover of the Muhammadans), from Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, volume 5: Cérémonies des mahométans, &c. (1737).
2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of the early eighteenth-century book series Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, a work on all the world’s religions known to Europe at that time and originally published in seven volumes between 1723 and 1737 in Amsterdam. Edited by the exiled French Huguenot Jean Frederic Bernard, the original seven volumes of the Cérémonies knew a vast distribution across European readers in the Netherlands, France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, among other countries. Its popularity was at least partly due to the impressive set of prints included within the books. After all, the engravings were for the most part manufactured by the exiled Parisian artist, Bernard Picart, who was known as one of Europe’s most distinguished engravers at that time.
More than ten years after the publication of some pioneering studies on the project—Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung (2006), The Book That Changed Europe (2010), and The First Global Vision of Religion (2010)—the intriguing ceremonies and customs of the various religions depicted in the books still capture the imagination. This is not only caused by their ingenuity regarding the comparative method of inquiry into religion in general, as earlier research widely acknowledged, but also because of their importance as an early modern compendium of imaging religious ceremonies. After all, as the title already indicates, the Cérémonies discusses global religious ceremonies and customs. It focuses on performing religion, instead of on religion as such.
In line with Picart and Bernard’s project, this conference aims to focus on the ways in which early modern Europeans related to religious ceremonies of all kinds, ranging from customs that were familiar to Western Europe’s everyday religious life, to rituals from peoples across the globe that were still rather alien to early modern Europeans. How did early modern Europeans perceive religious rituals practiced in other parts of the world, particularly those in overseas territories? To what extent did early modern knowledge production on religious customs contribute to the development of early anthropology and ethnography in the latter half of the eighteenth century? How did representations of religious rituals either endorse or challenge existing knowledge on various religious practices? In what ways did the early modern period witness a shift toward a more encyclopedic approach to representing the ceremonies and customs of various religions, and how did this reflect broader intellectual trends of the Enlightenment era?
Registration is available here»
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9.00 Keynote
• Inger Leemans (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) — Bernard Picart, Nil Volentibus Arduum, and the Concept of Imagineering
10.30 Panel 1 | Imag(in)ing Religious ‘Otherness’
1 Katherine Kelaidis (National Hellenic Museum / Center for Orthodox Christian Studies) — The Familiar Other: Re/Imagining Eastern Christian Religious Ceremony in Richard Chandler’s Journey to Mount Athos
2 Alexander McCargar (University of Vienna) — A Fascinating Enemy: Ottoman Depictions in the Work of Lodovica Ottavio Burnacini
3 Matthieu Guy Michel Somon (UC Louvain) — Scenes from the Religious Life according to Alessandro Magnasco
1.30 Panel 2 | Switching up Perspectives
4 Daniel Purdy (Pennsylvania State University) — The Spectacle of Chinese Idolatry: Dutch Book Illustrations contra Jesuit Accommodation
5 Philipp Stenzig (Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften) — Jean-Baptiste Le Brun des Marettes (1651–1731)
3.30 Panel 3 | Religious Ceremonies in New Spain
6 Luis Javier Cuesta Hernandez (Universidad Iberoamericana) — A Global History of Funeral Ceremonies for Philip IV of Spain: America and Africa
7 Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) — Between Concealing and Domesticizing: Ceremony and Community in Dominican Spaces of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico)
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9.00 Keynote
Agnès Guiderdoni (Université Catholique de Louvain) — The Hagiographic Spectacle in Seventeenth-Century France
10.30 Panel 4 | Ceremony, Festivity, and Cultures of Commemoration
8 Maria João Pereira Coutinho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) — Fiat Ignatio, Fida Ignatio: Visual and Performative Culture of Ignatius of Loyola’s Beatification Festivals in Brussels and Douai (1610)
9 Marek Walczak (Jagiellonian University) — ‘It Is a Memorial to Posterity that All These Adornments Have Been Set Up’: Glorification of the Past in the Celebrations Commemorating the Canonisation of St. John Cantius Held in Cracow in 1775
10 Ivo Raband (University of Hamburg) — 100 Years of Faith: The Festivities for the Centennial of the Recatholicization of Antwerp (1685)
1.30 Panel 5 | The Dramaturgy of the Pilgrimage
11 Barbara Uppenkamp and Anke Naujokat (Muthesisu Kunsthochschule Kiel & RWTH Aachen University) — The Heptagonal Pilgrimage Church in Scherpenheuvel and Its Three Image Programs
12 Jaroslaw Pietzrak (Pedagogical University of Kraków) — The Spectacle of Power: Religious Ceremonies and Rituals on the Court of Queen Maria Kazimiera d’Arquien Sobieska (1699–1714)
3.30 Panel 6 | Rituality and Ceremoniality in Late Medieval and Early Modern France
13 Margaret Aziza Pappano (Queen’s University) — The Priest in the Execution Ritual: Performing Pain and Penance in Late Medieval France
14 Joy Palacios (University of Calgary) — The Mass and Entertainments in Seventeenth-Century France’s Courtly Ritual System
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9.00 Keynote
Paola Von Wyss-Giacosa (University of Zurich) — Staging Religion(s) in the Early Enlightenment: Bernard Picart’s Frontispiece for Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde
10.30 Panel 7 | Re-considering Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses I
15 Steff Nellis (Ghent University) — Aspects of Theatricality in Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses
16 Margaret Mansfield (University of California) — Encore! Encore! Picart’s Repetitions of Religious Excess and Austerity in India
17 Sara Petrella (University of Fribourg) — Embodying Americas: From Western Representations to Indigenous Material Culture
1.30 Panel 8 | Re-considering Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses II
18 Rachel Kupferman (Bar Ilan University) — The Twin Sets of The Kehilot Moshe Bible
19 Nicolas Kwiátkowski (UPF) — From the Son of Adam and Eve to an All-Devouring Deity: Ganesha in Early Modern European Culture
20 Pascal Rihouet (Rhode Island School of Design) — The Pope’s Triumph: Plagiarized Prints from Rome to Amsterdam
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