Clark Conference in LA: Vision and Knowledge
Vision and Knowledge in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, 14-15 October 2011
Registration due by 7 October 2011
Conference Organized by Lynn Hunt and Ann Jensen Adams
“To see is to know,” wrote Aristotle. Even today, “I see” can mean “I understand.” Aristotle understood the connection between sight and knowledge to be physical, however. Before the seventeenth century, the eye was believed to be connected directly to the spirit: an impression of objects seen were understood as physically impressed upon the soul. Sight was, therefore, both the most powerful and the most dangerous of senses. Its perceived power lay behind the explosion of image creation in a wide variety of forms and media in the early modern period; and its perceived danger lay behind the iconoclastic fury of the Protestants who destroyed images in Catholic churches in the Low Countries in 1566. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, in a paradigm shift sometimes referred to by the much discussed term the “Scientific Revolution,” a space was opened between vision and the soul, with new attention to the imperfect ocular apparatus, and such voluntary activities as reflection and reason, articulated memorably by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” Empirical experience, enhanced by the invention of such optical devices as the microscope and telescope, took on new meaning, which in turn had a dramatic impact upon beliefs about the nature of images, their function in knowledge production, and the role of makers in their creation.
This conference investigates this moment so crucial to our modern world view through the perspectives of historians of art, of science, and of material culture, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our participants examine contemporaneous understandings of sight, and the resulting epistemological status and function of images in producing knowledge, from optics and the practice of fine art, its display, religion, to diagrams and natural history, architecture, travel illustration, colonialism, revolution, and the telegraph.
P R O G R A M
Friday, October 14th
9:30 Morning coffee
9:55 Barbara Fuchs (UCLA), Welcoming and Opening Remarks
10:00 Session I: Religious and Scientific Dimensions of Vision
• Stuart Clark (University of Wales, Swansea), The Discernment of Spirits: Vision and Knowledge in a Religious Context
• Jeanette Peterson (University of California, Santa Barbara), The Science of Optics, Materiality, and the Visionary in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century New Spain
• Lyle Massey (University of California, Irvine), Against the ‘statue anatomized’: Debates over Representation, Dissection, and Vision in Early Modern Anatomy
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Session II: Vision and Representation
• Ann Jensen Adams (University of California, Santa Barbara), Painted Surfaces and the Mechanisms of Sight
• Alexander Marr (University of Southern California), ‘Broken reflections of shapes in Sleepe’: Vision and Knowledge in Richard Haydocke’s Oneirologia
• Erica Naginski (Harvard University), Rococo Vision and the ‘Sonorous Body’ of Architecture
5:00 Reception
Saturday, October 15th
9:30 Morning Coffee
10:00 Session III: Vision, the Body, and Experience
• Elmer Kolfin (University of Amsterdam), When Africans Became Black: The Changing Image of Africans in Early Modern Netherlandish Prints (c.1500–1700)
• Bronwen Wilson (University of British Columbia), Inscription, the Horizon, and Early-Modern Journeys to Constantinople
• Annemieke Hoogenboom (Utrecht University), The Pictorial Diary of Christiaan Andriessen: The Snapshot View of an Eighteenth-Century Painter
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Session IV: Vision and the Political
• Lynn Hunt (University of California, Los Angeles), French Revolutionary Prints and the Discovery of Social Categories
• Richard Taws (University College, London), The Telegraphic Image in Revolutionary France
Williamsburg Symposium on Maps and Prints of Early America
From The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation:
Symposium: More than Meets the Eye: Maps and Prints of Early America
DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Williamsburg, VA, 16-18 October 2011
In conjunction with the exhibition More than Meets the Eye: Maps and Prints of Early America, Colonial Williamsburg will sponsor a symposium from October 16-18, 2011 that will feature lectures focusing on the men who created these objects, how they assembled and disseminated their information, and the factors that motivated them to create powerful and influential images. Speakers will include Philip Burden, Paul Cohen, Louis De Vorsey, Matthew Edney, William Gartner, and Henry Taliaferro. The conference begins with an opening reception Sunday evening followed by two days of lectures, Monday and Tuesday.
The conference brochure is available for download here»
Exhibition & Symposium: Drawings from the Louvre at the Morgan
I noted the show back in February, but I’m afraid tomorrow afternoon’s lecture series nearly slipped by me. From The Morgan:
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David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre
The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 23 September — 31 December 2011
Curated by Louis-Antoine Prat and Jennifer Tonkovich with assistance from Esther Bell
ISBN: 9780875981598, $40
From the time of the French Revolution of 1789 through the reign of King Louis-Philippe and the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852, an incredible concentration of artistic talent brought its collective skill to bear on one of the most turbulent times in French history. This exhibition features some of the greatest examples of works on paper of the period from Paris’s famed Musée du Louvre. Included are eighty drawings by such noted artists as David, Prud’hon, Ingres, Géricault, Delacroix, and Corot.
Rarely does the Louvre allow such a major group of drawings, with so many iconic works, to travel. The exhibition will offer visitors a singular opportunity to experience the mastery of the era. The Morgan is the only venue for this important show.
David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre is organized by Louis-Antoine Prat, curator in the Department of Graphic Arts at the Musée du Louvre and Jennifer Tonkovich, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Morgan Library & Museum, with the assistance of Esther Bell, Moore Curatorial Fellow, The Morgan Library & Museum.
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Symposium — Drawing in the Age of Revolutions: New Perspectives
The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 24 September 2011
This symposium coincides with the exhibition David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre, which offers the American public a rare opportunity to view some of the most celebrated French drawings from the Louvre. Through a series of brief talks, leading scholars will explore the diversity of draftsmanship during the period and present new research in the field. The program will conclude with a gallery conversation with curators and speakers, allowing for a closer examination of works on view.
The Art Market, Drawings Galleries, and Collectors
Louis-Antoine Prat, Curator, Department of Graphic Arts, Musée du Louvre, and Professor, Ecole du Louvre
Between Language and Painting: the Function of Drawing in the Later Work of Jacques-Louis David
Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, and Associate Provost for the Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Louvre Drawings: A Cultural Historian’s Perspective
Stéphane Gerson, Associate Professor of French and French Studies, New York University
Drawing’s Stepchild: The Printed Image from David to Delacroix
Patricia Mainardi, Doctoral Program in Art History Graduate Center, City University of New York
In-Gallery Talks:
“Petits Souvenirs de Bonne Amitié”: Drawings and Friendship in Nineteenth-Century France
Esther Bell, Moore Curatorial Fellow, Department of Drawings and Prints, Morgan Library & Museum
Place and Memory in Nineteenth-Century French Drawings
Alison Hokanson, Research Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Winterthur Exhibition & Conference: ‘With Cunning Needle’
As noted at A Fashionable Frolick, Winterthur explores the past four centuries of embroidery with the exhibition and conference, With Cunning Needle:
With Cunning Needle: Four Centuries of Embroidery
Winterthur Museum, Delaware, 3 September 2011 — 8 January 2012
Apron, England, 1730-40, silk with gold and silver on silk. Winterthur Museum, 1987.84
In 2006 Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts began an exciting and innovative project to accurately re-create a 17th-century embroidered woman’s jacket. The process of designing and making what has become known as the Plimoth Jacket has shed new light on the tools and methods employed by the skilled embroiderers of the 1600s. Using the Plimoth Jacket as a touchstone, With Cunning Needle delves into the designs, materials, techniques, and makers of embroidery over four centuries.
Explore each step in the process of creating needlework, from skeins of silk and pattern books to embroidered bed covers and silkwork pictures. Learn about the women and men who made these beautiful objects for themselves, their friends and families, and commercial sale. Discover “lost” skills that have been revived through the Plimoth Jacket project.
With Cunning Needle explores the history of embroidery and invites visitors to take a closer look at the wide array of styles, technology, and people reflected by this art form.
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From the conference webpage:
Embroidered petticoat fragment (detail), France, early 1700s. 2010.15. All Winterthur objects pictured on this page were purchased by the museum with funds provided by the Henry Francis du Pont Collectors Circle .
With Cunning Needle: A Winterthur Needlework Conference
Winterthur Museum, Delaware, 21-22 October 2011
L E C T U R E S (more…)
Conference at Edinburgh: Enlightenment Aesthetics and Beyond
Enlightenment Aesthetics and Beyond
University of Edinburgh, 15-16 December 2011
The Enlightenment Aesthetics and Beyond conference will bring together scholars in aesthetics and the history of philosophy to explore aesthetic theory in the Enlightenment, the reception of British aesthetic theory in Germany, and the significance of these ideas for contemporary debates in aesthetics and other fields.
The conference will address a range of topics, including: taste and judgment; expressivism; the sublime; aesthetics of nature; the intersection of aesthetics and moral philosophy; rationalist and empiricist approaches to aesthetics; and the theories of Du Bos, Hume, Reid, Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel, among others.
The conference builds upon projects carried out during the National Endowment of the Humanities research seminar, ‘Scottish Enlightenment Aesthetics and its German Reception’, held in St Andrews, Scotland, 2007. The conference is part of a series of events across the University of Edinburgh marking the tercentenary of David Hume’s birth (2011): ‘Celebrating Connections‘.
Keynote Speakers: Paul Guyer (Murray Professor of the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania) and Peter Jones (University of Edinburgh)
P R O G R A M M E
Thursday, December 15th
9:00 Registration
9.30 Jason Gaiger (Oxford University), ‘Du Bos and the “Democratisation” of Taste’
10:30 Coffee
11:00 James Shelley (Auburn University) ‘Hume on Choosing an Author’
12:00 Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern University) ‘Reid’s Expressivist Aesthetics’
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Keynote: Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania), ‘”A Treasure Chamber of the Human Soul”: Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Herder’
15:00 Tea
15:30 Jonathan Friday (University of Kent), TBA
17:30 Reception and Beholder art exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, Old College
19:30 Conference Dinner
Friday, December 16th
9:30 Keynote: Peter Jones (Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh), ‘Once More Back to the Contexts’
10:30 Coffee
11:00 Alex Neill (University of Southampton), ‘Schopenhauer and 18th-Century British Philosophy’
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Alison Stone (Lancaster University), ‘Early German Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nature’
14:00 Closing discussion
Saturday, December 17th
9:30 Historic City Tour with Charles Withers (Professor of Historical Geography, University of Edinburgh), registration required
BGC Study Day: Conserving Hats
From the BGC:
Study Day: The Conservation of Historic Hats
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 14 October 2011
Henry Pickering, "Portrait of Eleanor Frances Dixie, daughter of Wolstan Dixie, 4th Baronet," 1753 (Nottingham City Museums & Galleries)
This study day introduces rate examples of headwear from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art including: Tudor flat caps, a straw hat purported to be a gift from Henry VIII, and hats by Philip Treacy. Textile conservator Chris Paulocik will discuss the conservation and storage of these unique objects. After lunch at the BGC, artist and textile historian Edward Maeder will demonstrate the construction of selected hats from the eighteenth through twentieth centtury. Participants will learn stitching techniques using straw, ribbons, floral decoration and feathers.
Chris Paulocik is a textile conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Edward Maeder is an artist, textile historian, and former curator of costumes and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
$130 Adult / $100 Students and Seniors — Registration fee includes a supply kit.
The Wallace Collection’s Reynolds Research Project
Exciting news from The Wallace Collection (22 July 2011) . . .
X-Ray Image of the Portrait of 'Mrs Jane Braddyll', Wallace Collection, 2011
The Wallace Collection Reynolds Research Project is a three year project funded by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. A collaboration between the Wallace Collection and the Conservation and Scientific Departments at the National Gallery, its purpose is to investigate the techniques and materials used by Reynolds by examining twelve of his paintings, which are in the Wallace Collection; and use this research as a basis for their conservation.
To examine the paintings, images are captured using high resolution digital photography, infrared and x-ray, and small paint samples are taken. Initial results have already revealed how complex Reynolds’ technique really was!
This very exciting project will continue to yield new and surprising results, with all the research being made publicly available later in the project. Alongside this, the Wallace Collection will continue to provide updates as new discoveries are made. The first restored painting has already arrived back at the Collection: Mrs Elizabeth Carnac, which can now be seen in the Great Gallery. The project will culminate in an exhibition, catalogue and scholarly conference at the Collection in 2014, which is sure to be well worth the wait!
North American Conference on British Studies, November 2011
Annual Meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies
Denver, 18-20 November 2011
Registration is now open for the 2011 annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies, hosted by the Western Conference on British Studies. The conference will take place November 18-20, 2011, at the Sheraton Downtown Denver, right in the heart of the city. Details are available here»
Third Anglo-Italian Conference at York
This interdisciplinary conference is devoted to investigations of ‘the Marginal and the Mainstream’ in and between Italy and Great Britain in the eighteenth century. A number of sessions may be of interest to HECAA members, particularly the ‘Cultural Transfers’ and ‘Taste in the Arts’ panels. For registration details and accommodation information, see the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies website. –FG
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Third Anglo Italian Conference: The Marginal and the Mainstream in the Eighteenth Century
King’s Manor, York, 13-14 September 2011
Event Organisers: Frank O’Gormanand Lia Guerra
The counterpoint between the marginal and the mainstream has been for many decades a compelling and an important one. The idea of a ‘mainstream’ or ‘major stream’ may have an aquatic origin but in recent centuries has come to be associated with the idea of important or principal matters in hand, implying also the notion of something important, mighty, or even popular. In recent decades, the implication of ‘scholarly fashion’ may also have been added. Down to the sixteenth century the notion of ‘the marginal’ referred to the margin of a text, the space between the edge of the book and the text itself. Later, this idea admitted the concept of a boundary and later still the notion of the contour and border beyond which something ceases to be possible and desirable. Today, most scholars recognise a yet further extension to these definitions, the idea of dissident ideas, practices or opinions existing on the sidelines of the majority. (more…)
Exhibition: ‘The First Actresses’ in London
Press release rom the NPG:
The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons
National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 October 2011 — 8 January 2012
Curated by Gill Perry, supported by Lucy Peltz
John Hoppner, "Mrs. Robinson as 'Perdita'," 1782 © Chawton House Library, Hampshire
The first exhibition to explore art and theatre in eighteenth-century England through portraits of women will open at the National Portrait Gallery in October 2011. With 53 portraits, some brought together for the first time and others not previously seen in public, the exhibition will show the remarkable popularity of actress-portraits and provide a vivid spectacle of eighteenth-century femininity, fashion and theatricality. The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons will show large paintings of actresses in their celebrated stage roles, intimate and sensual off-stage portraits and mass-produced caricatures and prints, and explore how they contributed to the growing reputation and professional status of leading female performers.
The exhibition will combine much-loved works by artists such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, John Hoppner, Thomas Lawrence, Johann Zoffany and James Gillray, with some newly discovered works such as the National Portrait Gallery’s new acquisition of the Three Witches from Macbeth by Daniel Gardner.
After John Collett, "An Actress at Her Toilet or Miss Brazen just Breecht," ca. 1779
Actresses featured in the exhibition include Nell Gwyn, Kitty Clive, Hester Booth, Lavinia Fenton, Peg Woffington, Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, Dorothy Jordan, Elizabeth Farren, Giovanna Baccelli and Elizabeth Linley. Highlights include a little known version of Reynolds’s famous portrait of Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Hogarth’s The Beggar’s Opera, Gainsborough’s portraits of Giovanna Bacelli and Elizabeth Linley. Important loans include works from the Garrick Club Library, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Tate Britain, the V&A, as well as Petworth, Kenwood and Longleat Houses.
Starting with the emergence of the actress’s profession in the late seventeenth century, The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons will show how women performers, in drama, as well as music and dance, were key figures within a spectacular celebrity culture. Fuelled by gossipy theatre and art reviews, satirical prints and the growing taste for biography, eighteenth-century society engaged in heated debate about the moral and sexual decorum of women on stage and revelled in the traditional association between actress and prostitute, or ‘whores and divines’. The exhibition will also reveal the many ways in which women performers stimulated artistic innovation and creativity and provoked intellectual debate.
As well as focusing on the eighteenth-century actress as a glamorous subject of high art portraits, and the ‘feminine face’ of eighteenth century celebrity culture, the exhibition will look at the resonances with modern celebrity culture and the enduring notion of the actress as fashion icon. As a counterpoint to the exhibition, an accompanying display will show photographic and painted portraits, drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collections, of some of today’s actresses, some of whom have agreed to be the exhibition’s ‘Actress Ambassadors’. A full list will be published prior to opening.
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An exhibition conference will take place on Friday, 11 November 2011.
Exhibition catalogue: Gill Perry with Joseph Roach and Shearer West, The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2011), 160 pages, ISBN: 9781855144118, £30.
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