Enfilade

From the program for the Collecting Nature conference:

Collecting Nature
Kloster Irsee, Swabia, Germany, 24-27 May 2013

Organized by Sylvia Heudecker and Andrea Gáldy

Research in the history of collecting has often focused on collections of works of art and artefacts, even though the mediaeval and early modern kunst- and wunderkammern harboured both artificialia and naturalia from their very inception. In fact, some of the keenest collectors of art and antiquities, such as Cosimo I de’ Medici or the Saxon electors, were particularly renowned for their interest in the natural sciences, including geography, botany, and zoology. What started as a mass of curiosities – e.g. prepared animals, skeletons, minerals, and metal ore – soon was transformed into an insatiable quest for knowledge that was furthermore fanned by the age of exploration and the exploitation of far-away countries. Papers in this conference will focus on the intersection between the history of collecting and the history of science, while not forgetting the monastic or courtly context of provenance and display.

Irsee is a particularly interesting venue for in the eighteenth century Pater Eugen Dobler had set up a much admired bird cabinet. Although no trace of this cabinet remains, the room itself still exists and will be used for the conference’s academic sessions. International scholars will be presenting, the conference language is English.

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F R I D A Y ,  2 4  M A Y  2 0 1 3

6.00  Evening reception plus short introduction to the conference

Susanne Formanek (Institut für Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, Vienna), Collecting and Displaying Nature in Early Modern Japan

7.30  Dinner

S A T U R D A Y  2 5  M A Y  2 0 1 3

9.00  Andrea Gáldy and Sylvia Heudecker, Welcome

‘Naturalia’ and ‘Sculpture’ after Nature

9.15
• Rachel King (Pinakothek und Nationalmuseum, Munich), Collecting Nature within Nature: Animal Inclusions in Amber in Early Modern Collections
• Lisa Skogh (Stockholms Universitet), Bergwerke and Handsteine in the Royal Swedish Collections, 1654–1720
• Discussion

10.30  Coffee / Tea

11.00
• Angelica Groom (The Open University, Milton Keynes), Animal Collecting at the Medici Court in Florence: Real, Stuffed and Painted Beasts as Evidence of Shifting Values in the Display and Conceptualisation of the Zoological ‘Other’
• Virginie Spenlé (Kunstkammer Georg Laue, Munich), Casting from Nature: Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Metal Works for
Kunst- and Wunderkammern
• Discussion

12.30  Lunch

Nature and Naturalia Indoors

2.00
• Marcell Sebők (Central European University, Budapest), Wonders on the Walls: Visual Presentations and Displaying Nature and Knowledge in Early Modern Private Collections
• Giada Damen (Princeton University), Collecting and Cataloguing Art and Nature in a Venetian Palazzo
• Discussion

3.30  Coffee / Tea

4.00
• Ivo Raband (Universität Bern), An Archducal Collection in Brussels: Archduke Ernest of Austria and His Collecting Ambitions
• Shep Krech III (Brown University, Providence), Catesby’s Birds
• Discussion

7.00  Dinner

S U N D A Y ,  2 6  M A Y  2 0 1 3

9.00  Optional tour of Kloster Irsee

10.15  Optional Roman Catholic Mass

The Display of Naturalia: Libraries and Wunderkammern

11.15
• Barbara Tramelli (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte), Nature and Grotesques: Pirro Visconti Borromeo and the Collection in His Villa of Lainate
• Inga Elmqvist Söderlund (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University), Scientific Instruments in the Ideal Early Modern Library
• Discussion

12.30  Lunch

2.00
• Miriam H. Kirch (University of North Alabama, Florence), A Princely Plant Collector in Renaissance Germany
• Joy Kearney (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), Ornithology in the Dutch Golden Age: Captured Specimens and the Collecting of Exotica
• Discussion

3.30  Break

4.00
• Iordan Avramov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg and Circulation of Objects at the Early Royal Society of London, 1660–1677
• Anne Harbers (University of Sydney), Carl Linnaeus and the Natural History Collections of Lovisa Ulrika of Sweden at Drottningholm Palace
• Discussion

5.00  Coffee / Tea

5.30  Keynote Speech — Dornith Doherty (University of North Texas, Denton), Archiving Eden

7.00  Dinner

M O N D A Y ,  2 7  M A Y  2 0 1 3

Visit to the Südsee Museum, Obergünzburg and Kloster St Ottilien (Missions Museum) with lunch at the St Ottilien Biergarten

T U E S D A Y ,  2 8  M A Y  2 0 1 3

Tour of the Museum of the Abbey Ottobeuren in the morning

From the Freie Universität Berlin:

The Itineraries of Art Topographies of Artistic Mobility in Europe and Asia, 1500-1900 
Museen Dahlem and Freie Universität, Berlin 23-25 May 2013

Annual conference of the DFG Research Unit 1703 Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art: Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Contemporary Constellations. Organized by Project Area B Transgressive Itineraries and Transcultural Aesthetics of Artistic Exchange in cooperation with the DFG Research Project Landscape, Canon and Intermediality in Chinese Painting of the 1930s and 1940s.

The conference discusses the interaction between routes as channels of communication and as modes of artistic experience in Europe and Asia. While recent scholarship has devoted attention to the economic and political historiographies of road-systems, this conference will focus on routes as stimuli of cultural transfer and artistic production. Addressing interactive overland and maritime networks as itineraries of contact and catalysts of artistic exchange will underscore the cultural agency of routes and interconnections. Framed in the historiography of longue durée, routes may be addressed as trajectories that cut across culturally determined geographies and periodizations. The conference concentrates on the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries and thereby foregrounds a period characterized by the unprecedented expansion and transformation of pre-existent route-networks. In the wake of the first global circumnavigation in 1522, the connection of overland-roads and maritime routes triggered new dynamics of transcontinental entanglements.

The conference aims at parallel perspectives on both Western Europe and East Asia, geographical regions that imagined each other as ›natural‹ terminus points of the ancient Eurasian trade networks. Consequently, new combinations of transcontinental telluric and nautical routes profoundly affected such predominant cultural topographies and symbolic paradigms. The rise of Asian and European port cities as nodes of maritime systems and prosperous cultural contact zones, often at the expense of inland metropoles, bespeaks this fundamental shift. By the end of the nineteenth century this process entered its end-stages; it is hardly coincidental that in this period, marked by colonialism and nationalism, some of the most enduring narratives of pre-modern routes evolved. To relate the proliferation of routes in the Early Modern era to art and artistic practices is also to engage with not only the actual translocation of persons, animals and objects, but with protocols and mechanisms of control and constraint. Furthermore, it is crucial to pose the question of how the visual arts in diverse historical and cultural contexts contributed to the fabrication of collective imaginations about routes past and present, as well as long-distance journeys. Parallel enquiries of practices and tropes of artistic mobility in Western Europe and East Asia enable the reconsideration of previously separate research in the agency of routes pursued at the intersection of the histories of art, cross-cultural transfer and entanglement.

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T H U R S D A Y ,  2 3  M A Y  2 0 1 3

18:00  Gregor Stemmrich (Berlin), Opening

18:15  Karin Gludovatz (Berlin), Joachim Rees (Berlin), Introduction

18:30  Christian Kravagna (Vienna), When Routes Entered Culture: Histories and Politics of Transcultural Thinking

F R I D A Y ,  2 4  M A Y  2 0 1 3

9:30  Klaas Ruitenbeek (Museum für Asiatische Kunst, SMB), Welcome Remarks

Art/Histories of Routes – A Transcultural Paradigm?

9:45  Joachim Rees (Berlin), Introduction

10:00  Monica Juneja (Heidelberg), Tracking the Routes of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia

11:00  Michael North (Greifswald), Tracking European and Chinese Objects of Art in the Indian Ocean, 17th
and 18th Centuries

12:00 Lunch Break

13:30  Eugene Wang (Cambridge, MA), Why was there no Chinese Painting of Marco Polo? The Limits of
Itinerancy-Themed Art Historical Inquiry

14:30  Melanie Trede (Heidelberg), Sea Routes to the Mainland: Identity Politics and the Formation of a Cultural Memory in Japanese Pictorial Narratives

15:30  Coffee Break

Symbolic Itineraries and Topographies – Framing Roads and Routes

16:00  Juliane Noth (Berlin), Introduction

16:15  Evelyn Reitz (Berlin), Transcultural Ballast. Netherlandish Tiles as Vehicles of Exchange

17:15  Sophie Annette Kranen (Berlin), The Historicity of the Route in the Atlas of James Cook’s Third Voyage

S A T U R D A Y ,  2 5  M A Y  2 0 1 3

10:00  Elizabeth J. Kindall (St. Paul), Geo-Narrative in Seventeenth-Century China

11:00  Julia Orell (Zürich), The River as Personal Itinerary and Painting Lineage: Ten Thousand Miles along the Yangzi in Late Ming and Early Qing China

12:00  Lunch Break

Crossroads, Hubs and Centers – Art Forms of Interaction

13:30  Evelyn Reitz (Berlin), Introduction

13:45  Jessica Stewart (Munich), Accommodating Exotica, Incorporating Strangers: Displacement, Domestication and the Antwerp Market

14:45  Joachim Rees (Berlin), Nora Usanov-Geißler (Berlin), Harboring Expectations: The Littoral as Contact Zone in the Visual Arts of Japan and the Netherlands, ca. 1570-1630

15:45  Coffee Break

16:15  Yu-Chih Lai (Taipei), Court and Cultural Exchanges: A Study of the Album of Birds Produced at the Qing Qianlong Court

17:15  Ulrike Boskamp (Berlin), Art, Topography and Identity in a Military Hub: Representing the Portsmouth Area in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

From the conference website:

Textile Translations: Intermedia Processes of Textile Transfer in the Arts
University of Zurich, 6-7 June 2013

Organised by Anika Reineke and Anne Röhl (ERC-Project “Textile – An Iconology of the Textile in Art and Architecture,” University of Zurich)

Processes of transfer and translation are crucial to the production and fashioning of textile materials: In the production of textiles, images taken from other media are submitted to the structure of warp and weft or translated into loops, stitches and knots. Thus, every textile technique requires translations and alterations of the original draft, even if the relation of the transferred subject or pattern to the media varies according to the technique: In the case of a woven image or a textile print, image and support are inseparable, though an embroidered motif, however, can be clearly distinguished from its backdrop. Translations into the textile and vice versa inevitably entail variation, mutation and adaptation. In this way translation processes leave traces inscribed in the particular object.

Because of the variety of manufacturing processes and their flexibility and malleability as material, technique, medium and metaphor, textiles provide a number of starting points for future research on processes of transfer. The symposium Textile Translations seeks to investigate these. In doing so, it is not the intent to focus on the alleged hierarchy of the original and the copy – or a comparison of before and after – but rather on the process of translation and its effects and implications. In this regard, textiles can be positioned at the beginning and end of such processes, or even due to their flexibility and adaptability, embody transitory conversion. Focusing on the process as the ‘inbetween’, the interactions of textiles and other media are the main concern of the symposium.

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T H U R S D A Y ,  6  J U N E

14:00  Anika Reineke and Anne Röhl (University of Zurich), Welcome and Introduction

I. Appropriation of Textile Crafts
Chair: Merel van Tilburg (University of Geneva)

14:15  Leena Crasemann (Freie Universität Berlin), Sewing. Unravelling. Cutting. Of Sewn Everyday Things and Textile Art Objects

14:45  Sara Martinetti (EHESS/INHA, Paris), The Fabricated Image. Pictorial and Textile Situations in the Work of
Robert Gober

15:15  Discussion

15:30  Caroline Schopp (University of Chicago) “…draw him from behind”. The Roth-Wiener Tapestry Collaboration,
1974–1998

16:00  Discussion

16:15  Coffee

II. Textile Transfer
Chair: Anne Röhl (University of Zurich)

16:45  Kathrin Fehringer (University of Erfurt), Textile Handarbeit als Raumkonstitutiv: Das Bild des ‚hortus conclusus’ in Flauberts Madame Bovary

17:15  Johanna Függer (University of Vienna), Hanna(h) Höchs Stickerei der Avantgarde

17:45  Discussion

F R I D A Y ,  7  J U N E

9:30    Coffee and Welcome

III. Translations of Motifs, Patterns, and Objects
Chair: Anika Reineke, Tristan Weddigen (University of Zurich)

9:45  Vera-Simone Schulz (KHI, Florenz), Text(ile)s Translated. Woven Words in 14th-Century Italian Painting

10:15  Ariane Koller (University of Berne), Gewirkte Wissenschaft – Kartographierte Geschichte. Intermediale
Transferprozesse zwischen Tapisserien und Karten

10:45  Discussion

11:00  Coffee

11:15  Liza Oliver (Northwestern University, Chicago), Don Quixote in 18th-Century India. Translation and Migration of Indian ‘Kalamkari’ Textile Designs for France

11:45  Karin Westphal-Erikson (University of Copenhagen), Porous ‘Paintings’ – Asger Jorn’s Textile Art in between Painting and Architecture

12:15  Discussion

13:00  Closing remarks

From Entre art et industrie:

Le sens du métier : identité et organisation dans les métiers
d’art et d’industrie en France (XVIIe-XXe siècles)
Université Paris, 31 May 2013

L’historiographie a longtemps fait de l’organisation corporative le pilier institutionnel du monde des métiers sous l’Ancien Régime, s’enfermant ainsi dans un débat opposant « corporatisme » et « libéralisme », et faisant des lois de 1791 l’aboutissement d’un long combat des libéraux contre le supposé archaïsme des communautés d’arts et métiers. Depuis une vingtaine d’années, cette vision ancienne a été complètement révisée : il importe de distinguer entre l’exercice d’une profession et l’appartenance à une corporation ; toutes les professions ne sont pas uniformément « instituées » en métiers corporés ; les réalités professionnelles sont bien plus diverses ; enfin, la dissolution des corporations en 1791 n’a pas supprimé tous les besoins organisationnels ou réglementaires, pas plus que les représentations identitaires des différentes professions artisanales. Ainsi, d’une part, la conscience d’une appartenance professionnelle a existé sous l’Ancien Régime en dehors de la forme corporative, et d’autre part, les identités de métier ont continué d’exister après l’abolition des corporations.

Cette journée d’études est consacrée au cas des professions d’art, qui oscillent entre « art » et « industrie » dans les représentations communes, et se situent précisément bien souvent en dehors du système corporatif : comment penser alors l’identité de métier, quand  le savoir-faire ne s’incarne pas dans une forme instituée susceptible de  cristalliser et manifester à la fois une appartenance collective, de découper un « eux » et un « nous » ? Quel sens, en somme, peut avoir le métier sans corporation ?

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9.45  Accueil, café/thé

10.00  Introduction : Philippe Minard, Audrey Millet (IDHE-Paris 8)

10:15
• Lesley Miller (Victoria and Albert Museum, Londres), Un pied dans la Grande Fabrique. Les dessinateurs de la soierie lyonnaise au XVIIIe siècle
• Audrey Millet (Université Paris 8, IDHE), Dessiner des indiennes de Pondichéry à New-York : une organisation en réseaux (XVIIe-XIXe siècles)

11.15  Discussion : Corine Maitte (Université Paris-Est-Marne-la-Vallée)

12.00  Repas sur place

13.45
• Elodie Voillot (Université Paris Ouest – INHA), Unir, promouvoir et protéger : la Réunion des fabricants de bronzes (1818-1870)
• Eugénie Briot (Université Paris-Est-Marne-la-Vallée), Inspiration vs oxydoréductions : le métier de parfumeur au XIXe siècle, entre chimie et alchimie
• Jérémie Cerman (Université Paris-Sorbonne), L’atelier de dessin industriel de Robert Ruepp, une entreprise prédominante de la Belle Époque

15.15  Discussion : Patrick Verley (Université de Genève)

From ArtHist:

Die Entdeckung der Nacht: Wirklichkeitsaneignungen im Prozess der europäischen Aufklärung
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, 6-7 June 2013

Tagungsleitung: Helmut Hühn und Reinhard Wegner

Fachtagung der Forschungsstelle Europäische Romantik, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Senatssaal, 06.-07. Juni 2013, zu Ehren von Prof. Dr. Reinhard Wegner, der 60 Jahre alt wird.

„Dennoch wüßten wir nichts“, schreibt der Philosoph Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in seiner Freiheitsschrift von 1809, „das den Menschen mehr antreiben könnte, aus allen Kräften nach dem Lichte zu streben, als das Bewußtseyn der tiefen Nacht, aus der er ans Daseyn gehoben worden. […] Alle Geburt ist Geburt aus Dunkel ans Licht; das Samenkorn muß in die Erde versenkt werden und in der Finsterniß sterben, damit die schönere Lichtgestalt sich erhebe und am Sonnenstrahl sich entfalte. Der Mensch wird im Mutterleibe gebildet; und aus dem Dunkeln des Verstandlosen (aus Gefühl, Sehnsucht, der herrlichen Mutter der Erkenntniß) erwachsen erst die lichten Gedanken.“

Die Fachtagung untersucht die kulturelle Dialektiken, die sich von den “Night-Thoughts” eines Edward Young (1742-45) und ihrer sechzigjährigen europäischen Rezeption über die semantischen Umbesetzungen im Verhältnis von Tag und Nacht bei den großen Nachtdenkern und -künstlern um 1800 bis in die Gegenwart hinein vollziehen.

Die einzelnen Beiträge des Workshops arbeiten werkbezogen. Sie weisen an Werken der Musik, der Kunst, der Literatur, der Philosophie und der Wissenschaftsgeschichte Spannungen und Umbrüche auf und vergegenwärtigen diese vor dem Hintergrund der Selbstverständigungsprozesse der europäischen Aufklärung und Romantik. Im Zentrum des Erkenntnisinteresses steht die Korrelation von künstlerischer Entdeckung der Nacht und epistemischer Erkundung der Wirklichkeit.

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D O N N E R S T A G ,  6  J U N I  2 0 1 3

14.15  Helmut Hühn (Jena): Ausgeburten der Nacht. Begrüßung und Einführung

14.30  Dieter Blume (Jena): Nachtbetrachtungen vor der Romantik

15.00  Johannes Grave (Bielefeld): Grund und Abgrund. Die ‚Nachtseiten‘ des Bildes um 1800

15.30  Pause

16.00  Britta Hochkirchen (Weimar): Verführen und erkennen. Aufklärung als Sündenfallgeschichte in Jean-Baptiste Greuzes „La cruche cassée“ (1771)

16.30  Alexander Rosenbaum (Weimar/Jena): „Ein glückliches Bild“: Johann Heinrich Meyers Entwurf „Triumph der Aurora“ (1786/91)

17.00  Pause

17.30  Temilo van Zantwijk (Jena): “Die Stätte der Einzelheit ist die ewige Nacht”. Schelling und der dunkele Grund des Daseins

18.15  Sabine Schneider (Zürich): Dunkler Sinn. Klassisch-romantische Mythopoetik der Nacht. Abendvortrag

F R E I T A G ,  7  J U N I  2 0 1 3

9.00  Einführung und Moderation: Elisabeth Fritz (Jena)

9.15  Thomas Lange (Hildesheim): Nachtsicht. Lektionen der Dunkelheit

9.45  Franziska Bomski (Weimar): Der Untergang der Sonne im Klingsohr-Märchen. Astronomie und Metaphysik bei Novalis

10.15  Pause

10.45  Markus Bertsch (Koblenz): Vom Tag in die Nacht. Beobachtungen zu Philipp Otto Runges Graphikzyklus der „Zeiten“

11.15  Christian Scholl (Göttingen): Aufziehender Morgen: Tageszeiteninszenierungen in Zimmerausstattungen Karl Friedrich Schinkels

11.45  Harald Tausch (Gießen): Die Nacht in finsteren Zeiten. Ein Rückblick auf die Frühe Neuzeit aus der Perspektive des Jahres 1942

12.15  Mittagspause

14.00  Verena Krieger (Jena): Die im Dunkeln sieht man doch. Markus Döhnes “Green Screens“

14.30  Reinhard Wegner (Jena): Verbindungslinien. Abschließende Betrachtungen

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Helmut Hühn, romantikforschung@uni-jena.de

From the University of Liverpool:

Dr Mark Towsey has been awarded £36,225 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to develop a two-year international research network on Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. Together with his partners at Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Dr Williams’s Library (London), Mark will host three workshops on the cultural history of libraries in the long eighteenth century, seeking to establish a dynamic, longer-lasting, multi- and interdisciplinary research forum to investigate the role of libraries in shaping communities in the past.

The first event, to be held at the Liverpool Athenaeum Library in August 2013 or January 2014 will explore the role of libraries in the Atlantic World; the second, to be held in Chicago in June 2014, will workshop the use of digital technologies in deepening our understanding of historic reading communities and the social impact of the printed word; the third, to be held in London in January 2015, will assess the role of libraries in community formation, asking whether historical models of library provision and administration can be adapted to meet the challenges faced by community libraries in the digital age, and in an age of financial austerity.

Further information on the network, its aims and objectives, and its planned activities, will soon be found on the History department’s research projects webpage. If you would like to find out more about the network, or would like to take part, please contact the project leader on Towsey@liv.ac.uk.

I posted notice of this two-day conference in February, but here I’ve included the full program, and what a program! In addition to the really interesting papers, the breakout sessions look like immense fun. -CH

From The Getty:

Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 10-11 May 2013

Mounted Vase, Chinese porcelain ca. 1662–1722, French mounts, ca. 1745–49. J. Paul Getty Museum (79.DI.121.1)

The Getty Research Institute and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute are co-sponsoring a two-day conference, “Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World,” on Friday, May 10 and Saturday, May 11, 2013, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California.

An international group of scholars will examine the circulation of objects across regions and cultures in the early modern period (1500-1800), addressing the ways in which mobility led to new meanings, uses, and interpretations. Break-out sessions will invite the audience to consider these questions as we examine objects from the Getty’s collections. A closing roundtable will provide an opportunity to discuss the methodological and theoretical potential of this line of inquiry for the study and teaching of art history. The symposium is organized by Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California), Meredith Martin (Wellesley College), and Joanne Pillsbury (Getty Research Institute).

Admission is free. Separate reservations are required for each
day of the conference.

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F R I D A Y ,  1 0  M A Y  2 0 1 3

8:30  Coffee and Pastries

9:30  Welcome, Andrew Perchuk (Getty Research Institute) and Peter Mancall (USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute)

9:35  Introductory Remarks, Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California) and Meredith Martin (Wellesley College)

9:45  Session 1 — Moderator: Joanne Pillsbury (Getty Research Institute)

• “The Itinerant Lives of Mexican Codices,” Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California)

• “Trading in the Senses: Exotica On and Off the Early Modern Dutch Marketplace,” Claudia Swan (Northwestern University)

11:15  Coffee Break

11:30  Session 2 — Moderator: Alka Patel (University of California, Irvine)

• “Diana Transformed: The Case of the Diana Automaton,” Jessica Keating (University of Southern California)

• “Translating, Transporting, and Transforming Mughal History: An Illustrated French Translation of the ‘Ain-i Akbari,” Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University)

1:00  Lunch

2:00  Breakout Sessions

Lacquer Without Borders led by Arlen Heginbotham, Conservator, J. Paul Getty Museum

This tour through the Museum galleries focuses on examples of Chinese and Japanese lacquer that have been incorporated into French decorative arts and addresses the worldwide exchange of aesthetics, raw materials, and finished goods associated with the lacquer trade.

VOILA—How Science Can Help Establish a Community of Asian Lacquer Researchers, led by Michael Schilling, Senior Scientist, Getty Conservation Institute

Ever wondered why scientists study cultural heritage? This tour of the Organic Materials Laboratory at the Getty Conservation Institute illustrates the role of science in uncovering the mysteries of Asian lacquer, the topic of a recent workshop for conservators and scientists hosted by the Institute.

Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, led by Stephanie Schrader, Curator, J. Paul Getty Museum

This exhibition tells an intriguing story about early trade between Europe and Asia, the trafficking of Asian slaves, a shipwreck, the role of Jesuit missionaries in the East, and an unusual hat. Featuring a masterpiece from the Getty collection, Man in Korean Costume, the exhibition includes important scholarship that illuminates unexplored facets of Peter Paul Rubens’s much-celebrated career.

An Evolving Understanding of the Object via Art History and Science: La Roldana’s San Ginés, led by Maite Alvarez, Project Specialist, and Jane Bassett and Brian Considine, Conservators, J. Paul Getty Museum

In the early modern period, materials such as pigments, woods, and dyes traveled across the globe. Scientific advances have enabled these global materials to be more clearly identified; in fact, material identification has became such a part of art history that larger questions are often missed: How do we come to the conclusions we come to? How do we bring out true knowledge rather than conjecture? What are the implications and what is at stake? This session examines Spanish artist La Roldana’s polychrome wood sculpture San Ginés and her use of New World materials like cochineal, indigo, and cedar. An interdisciplinary team of scholars arrived at a new understanding of this work through the combined application of art history and science.

From Military Campaigns to Museum Collections, led by Louis Marchesano, Curator, and Peter Bonfitto, Senior Project Management Coordinator, Getty Research Institute

Napoleon’s military expedition in Egypt was a monumental failure, but it provided both the French and the English an opportunity to seize the country’s riches. This session presents a variety of publications related to the military campaign, including the multivolume Description de l’Égypte (1809–28), auction catalogs, and museum publications.

Imperial Impressions: Chinese Engravings and French Models, led by Marcia Reed, Chief Curator, Getty Research Institute

Rare prints from the Getty Research Institute’s collections demonstrate the evolution of China’s cultural exchange with Europe during the Qing Dynasty.

Facing East: The Western View of Islam in Early Modern Europe, led by David Brafman, Curator, Getty Research Institute

The Getty Research Institute’s rare books and manuscripts from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment display the evolving knowledge of Islamic art and culture in early modern Europe.

Untold Stories: Collecting and Transforming Medieval Manuscripts, led by Elizabeth Morrison, Curator, J. Paul Getty Museum

For hundreds of years, manuscripts have been bought and sold, hidden and displayed, preserved and rearranged, loved and forgotten, cut into pieces, hung on the wall, and glued into albums. Drawn from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection and featuring several outside loans, this exhibition reveals how manuscripts have been refashioned both conceptually and physically and explores the long and eventful history of these books before their arrival at the Museum.

3:15  Session 3 — Moderator: Stephen Little (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

• “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship,” Meredith Martin (Wellesley College)

• “Coins for Candles: Asian Commodities and the Visual Culture of Spanish America,” Dana Leibsohn (Smith College)

4:45  Reception

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S A T U R D A Y ,  1 1  M A Y  20 1 3

8:30  Coffee and Pastries

9:30  Session 4 — Moderator: Charlene Villaseñor Black (University of California, Los Angeles)

• “From the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Paraguayan Outback: The Itinerant lives of Rococo Decorative Prints in Eighteenth-Century South America,” Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada)

• “Monumentality in Motion: A Mughal Audience Tent in Late Eighteenth-Century Jodhpur,” Zirwat Chowdhury (Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, University of California, Los Angeles)

11:00  Coffee Break

11:15  Session 5 — Moderator: Polly Roberts (University of California, Los Angeles)

• “Porcelain Objects and Mercantile Aesthetics: Trading Culture in Coastal East Africa,” Sandy Prita Meier (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

• “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: On the Postures of Commercial Documentation in the Early Modern Indian Ocean,” Nancy Um (SUNY–Binghamton)

12:45  Lunch

2:00  Session 6 — Moderator: Sean Roberts (University of Southern California)

• “Classicizing the New: The Publication of the History of the New World (Tarih ül-Hind il garbi el-müsemma bi-Hadis-i nev),” Avinoam Shalem (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich)

• “Technology in Paradise,” Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

3:30  Coffee Break

3:45  Closing Roundtable Discussion

5:15  Closing Reception