Conference | Sculpture and Trompe l’œil in European Ceramics
From the conference programme:
Sculpture and Trompe l’œil in European Ceramics:
From Bernard Palissy to the Present Day
Second Edition of the Annual Conference on European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Online, 12–13 July 2026
A combined effort of the Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes and the Low Countries Sculpture Society, whose libraries and archives have merged and are housed in the Hôtel de la Roche (1750) at Mons, the Annual International Conference had its inaugural edition in July 2025. This edition, dedicated to European ceramics, aims to address issues relating to figurative sculpture in the round, to relief sculpture and to trompe l’oeil, all in the medium of ceramics. This includes the imitation of other materials, such as wood or precious stones, and the mimetic representation of animals and plants. Sculpture and trompe l’oeil are recurring themes but have been little studied in a comprehensive manner in European ceramic art, not even in Art Deco ceramics, which frequently use sculptural forms, both in tableware and in purely decorative pieces.
The term trompe l’oeil comes from the world of easel painting, and the conference will be an opportunity to define more precisely the use and usefulness of this term in the world of ceramics. Our conference proposes to study cases that can shed light on this practice, from the Renaissance to the present day, in terms of the rendering of forms, colours and textures. These cases may concern the production, consumption, collecting and display of these types of ceramics throughout Europe and North America, from the Renaissance to the present day. Issues of design history, collaborations between creators and producers, artists and artisans, as well as the relations with any other people involved in the production of these ceramics may be studied. The theme will draw, in particular but not exclusively, on the rich tradition of ceramics in the Low Countries, from Antwerp majolica, via Tournai porcelain and Bouffioulx stoneware, to contemporary productions.
The conference will take place without audience (apart from the speakers, moderators and a few benefactors), but it will be filmed and broadcast live on YouTube for free, on our dedicated channel, The Low Countries Sculpture Society. The conference proceedings will be published in 2027 in a new academic journal dedicated to European sculpture and decorative arts, based on our annual international conferences.
Scientific Committee
Jean-Dominique Augarde, Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ebénistes, Paris / Mons
Yves De Leeuw, collector and exhibition curator
Bernard Dragesco, Dragesco-Cramoisan Gallery, Paris / Château de Barly
Errol Manners, historic ceramics specialist, London
Sylvie Millasseau-Wengraf, art historian, Switzerland
Tamara Préaud, formerly Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, and president, The French Porcelain Society, London
Miriam E. Schefzyk, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Volker Seiberth, University of Heidelberg / The Low Countries Sculpture Society
Pier Terwen, art historian and conservator of sculpture and ceramics, Leiden
Organising Committee
Katia Berseneva, Ecole du Louvre, Paris / The Low Countries Sculpture Society
Guillaume Hambye, notary, Mons
Laurence Lenne, Galerie Art & Patrimoine, Ath
Léon Lock, The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons
Grégory Maugé, Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes, Paris / Mons
Thierry Naveaux, The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons
Sébastien Tercelin de Joigny, Tercelin de Joigny Gallery, Mons / Seneffe
Jenny Tondreau, Collegiate church of Sainte-Waudru, Mons
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9.30 Léon Lock (The Low Countries Sculpture Society) — Introduction
10.05 Keynote Lecture
• Patricia Ferguson (London) — Artifice and Spectacle: the Conceit of a Lettuce as Large as Life for the European Table in the Mid-18th Century
11.00 Break
11.30 Session 1 | Trompe l’œil and Mimesis I
Moderator: Errol Manners
• Melody Hsu (McGill University, Montreal) — Book Flask: Trompe l’Œil and Deception in Early Modern Europe
• Mariette Boudgourd (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) —Jardinières bûches, verres paysages et cendriers poissons. De nouvelles formes de la nature « genre Palissy » au XIXe siècle en France
12.45 Lunch break
14.00 Session 2 | Trompe l’œil and Mimesis, II
Moderator: Volker Seiberth
• Nadia Mariana Consiglieri, Universidad de Buenos Aires — Reptiles, amphibians and trompe l’œil in a Bernard Palissy ceramic piece from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires
• Carina-Nathalia Madonna Visconti-Paff (Sapienza Università di Roma) — The Illusion of Lustre: Trompe l’œil in Hungarian Zsolnay Ceramics, Eosin Imitations of Metals and Nature in the Art Nouveau Style
15.15 Break
15.45 Session 3 | The Sculptor and the Sculptural in Ceramics
Moderator: Bernard Dragesco
• Jean-Dominique Augarde (Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ebénistes, Paris/Mons) — Piat Joseph Sauvage et le Salon de 1798
16.20 Keynote Lecture
• Errol Manners (historic ceramics specialist, London) — Louis-François Roubiliac and Chelsea Porcelain: A Reassessment
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9.30 Session 4 | Manufactures, Workshops, and Sculptors in Ceramics
Moderator: Sylvie Millasseau-Wengraf
• Valérie Montens (Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels) and
Elise Urbain Ruano (Domaine & Musée royal de Mariemont) — Entre virtuosité technique et langage décoratif : la sculpture en porcelaine à la manufacture d’Ixelles de 1830 à 1953
• Carys Wilkins et Claire Blakey (National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh) — European Ceramic Sculpture Rediscovered at National Museums Scotland
• Grégory Maugé (Centre de Recherches Historiques sur les Maîtres Ébénistes, Paris / Mons) and Léon Lock (The Low Countries Sculpture Society, Brussels / Mons) — La sculpture en céramique en Hainaut au XXe siècle
Online Talk | Mei Mei Rado on Chinoiserie Textile Designs
From the Cooper Hewitt:
Mei Mei Rado | Chinoiserie Designs in Textiles
Online, 8 July 2026, 1pm (ET)
Curtain, 1774–1811, after Jean-Baptiste Pillement, printed by Bromley Hall, copperplate printed cotton plain weave (New York: Cooper Hewitt, American Textile History Museum Collection, 2016-35-101).
Join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk exploring a selection of chinoiserie (Chinese-inspired) designs used in works on paper and textiles from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection.
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, innovative chinoiserie designs in European textiles vividly reflected the cross-cultural exchanges fostered by global networks of trade, Jesuit missions, diplomatic contacts, and colonial expansions. Print sources, including illustrated travel accounts and decorative vignettes by artists such as François Boucher and Jean Pillement, provided major inspirations for the chinoiserie motifs across various textiles mediums, ranging from tapestry and silk, to embroidery and printed cotton. Used for furnishings or fashionable dress, these textiles offered Europeans visual knowledge and imaginative engagements with a distant land and foreign culture. Meanwhile, European chinoiserie textiles also travelled back to China, where they sparked a very different set of perceptions and imagination of the West. This is the third and final program of our recent series exploring the connections between Chinese and Western art and design from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.
Registration is available here»
Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor at Bard Graduate Center, New York. Her research focuses on the history of textiles, dress, and decorative arts in China and France from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Previously Dr Rado served as Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her recent monograph The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025) was the winner of the 2026 Louis Gottschalk book prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a finalist for the 2026 Charles Rufus Morey book award of the College Art Association.
Jamie Kwan is the Assistant Curator of Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt. Before her time at Cooper Hewitt, Kwan served as the Associate Curator at the Wende Museum, an institution focused on the Cold War in Culver City, California. She has also held positions at the Morgan Library & Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Huntington Library, and Getty Research Institute.
Conference | 2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
From Historic Deerfield:
Futurecasting, Futurekeeping: New Englanders Imagine Worlds to Come
2026 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife
Online and in-person, Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 26–27 June 2026
In-person registration closes June 22 at noon. Virtual registration will stay open through the event. All registrants receive access to recordings of the event for one month.
In 2026, the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife will mark its 50th anniversary by looking both backwards and ahead. As this year’s seminar looks forward to its own future, we will contemplate ways residents of the region (broadly construed) have envisioned, foretold, and worked to shape various futures over the region’s long history. Events will include reflection on, and celebration of, the Seminar’s fifty years as a source of scholarship and publication on the everyday life, work, and culture of New England’s past.
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Ruthy Rogers (1778–1812), Needlework Picture, Marblehead, Massachusetts, ca. 1789, silk on linen, 27 × 23 cm (New York: American Folk Art Museum, gift of Ralph Esmerian, 2005.8.53).
10.00 Optional Morning Activity
Tours at Bellamy House and remarks from the Director, Chicopee Falls, MA (Pre-registration is required: $12 per person)
12.00 Registration opens at Historic Deerfield
1.20 Virtual sign-in opens for online attendees
1.30 Welcome — Marla Miller (Distinguished Professor of History, UMass Amherst, and President, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife)
1.45 Panel 1 | Planned Communities
Moderator: Christian Goodwillie (Director and Curator of Special Collections, Hamilton College, Burke Library)
• Carl Guarneri (Professor Emeritus of History, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Research Scholar, Colgate University) — Brook Farm: Boston ‘Combined Households’, and the Utopian Origins of Urban Communal Housing, 1846–1851
• CJ Martin (Visiting Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross) — Black Millerites
• Diana Lempel (Scholar/Practitioner of Folk History) — The Blessing of the Attic: Cambridge Co-operative Housekeeping Society and Family Memory Keeping
3.15 Break with refreshments
3.30 Tribute to Founders
3:45 Futurecasting: A Roundtable on the Past, Present, and Future of New England Studies
Sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Public History Program and Historic Northampton
Moderator: J. Ritchie Garrison (Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Delaware)
• Emelie Gevalt (Deputy Director and Chief Curatorial and Program Officer, American Folk Art Museum)
• Thomas Guiler (Director of Museum Affairs, Oneida Community Mansion House)
• Philippe Halbert (Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
5.00 Reception
Sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston University Program in American Studies
Join us for a celebratory reception marking the 50th anniversary of the Dublin Seminar. Enjoy heavy hors d’oeuvres and assorted beverages in the company of the Dublin Seminar membership and your colleagues for this festive occasion. (Pre-registration is $25)
7.00 Keynote Address
• Holly Jackson (Chair of American Studies and Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston) — The Ends of the World in Antebellum New England
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8.30 Deerfield Community Center opens. In-person attendees may pick up name badges and information packets.
8:50 Virtual sign-in for online attendees
9.00 Panel 2 | Imagined Futures in Literature
Moderator: Barbara Matthews (Independent Historical Consultant)
• Megan Pickett (The Winchendon School) — ‘Where to Go Next’: Utopian Immediacy in Total Loss Farm
• Ella Koston (PhD student at Boston University’s American Studies Program) — Afrofuturist Vision: Pauline Hopkins
10.30 Break
10.45 Panel 3 | Imagined Futures in Material Culture
Moderator: Erika Gasser (Director of Academic Programs, Historic Deerfield)
• Elizabeth Eager (Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University) — Futurity Imagined through Women’s Needlework
• Victoria Kenyon (Curatorial Track doctoral candidate, Art History, University of Delaware) — Magical Flowers: Fortune-Telling Objects from New England
• Brece Honeycutt (Independent Scholar/Multimedia Artist) — Building Harmony / Constructing Color
12.15 Lunch (buffet provided at the Deerfield Inn)
1.45 Panel 4 | Limits of Progressivism: Sexual Politics
Moderator: Erica Lome (Curator of Collections, Historic New England)
• Hunter Moskowitz (Researcher at American Ancestors, Boston) — Factory as Utopia: Imaginations of Sexuality in Early Lowell
• Catherine Terelak (Interpreter at Historic New England’s Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House) — An Intentional Community: Gloucester’s Dabsville
• Stephen Paterwic (Trustee of the Shaker Library and Museum, Sabbathday Lake, Maine) — Shakers and the Second Gathering
3.15 Break
3.30 Panel 5 | Forecasting Future Ecologies
Moderator: Nan Wolverton (Vice President for Academic and Public Programs, American Antiquarian Society)
• Meghan Freeman (Fellowship and Internship Program Director, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) — Bird Day, Now and Forever: Mabel Osgood Wright and the Future of New England Bird-Life
• Li-hsin Hsu (Professor of English, National Chengchi University, Taiwan) — Silk Culture, Utopian Experiment, and Anthropocene Imagination in Mid-19th-Century New England
• Dan McKanan (Emerson Senior Lecturer, Harvard Divinity School) — Imagining the Future Forest
5.00 Closing Remarks — John Davis (President, Historic Deerfield, Inc)
Colloquium | Visualizing Antiquity: The Copy of the Copy
From ArtHist.net:
Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints V:
The Copy of the Copy … of the Copy: Techniques of Pictorial Reception of
Antiquity in the Early Modern Period
Online and in-person, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3 July 2026
Organized by Elisabeth Décultot, Arnold Nesselrath, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch
Various early modern depictions of Harpocrates (the Greek form of the Egyptian child-god Horus).
In virtually all areas of human creativity, the outcomes—whether intentional or not—are subject to the principle of repetition. Likewise, in the history of acquisition of knowledge about antiquity, what has once been recorded in writing or in images regularly becomes the starting point for reproduction. The information gathered at the beginning of the line of transmission is henceforth copied and disseminated for as long as there is a need for it, with the copies themselves often becoming multipliers through replication. In this context, copies by no means function merely as duplicates in a subordinate hierarchical relationship to the ‘original’. In chains of transmission that are usually preserved only in fragments, and often in the absence of the lost ‘original’, copies are rather a standard of transmission and thus offer crucial insights into historical processes, illustrate methodological strategies and promote epistemic understanding by making visible the continuous engagement with ancient models. The fifth colloquium in the series, Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints focuses on diverse processes of copying in the graphic arts and examines the role of copies as powerful resources of knowledge in the context of the preservation, transmission and creative transformation of concepts of antiquity.
Admission is free, with the required registration available here. Online access will be available here.
p r o g r a m m e
12.30 Welcome and Introduction — Elisabeth Décultot (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) and Cristina Ruggero (BBAW)
12.45 On the Theories of Copies
Chair: Elisabeth Décultot (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
• Arianna Farina (Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples), Reproducing Art: the Copy as an Epistemic Device
1.15 Antiquities in Academic Contexts
Chair: Tommaso Gristina (Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome)
• Lorenzo Giammattei (Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome), Learning Antiquity through Copies: Vincenzo Camuccini and the Transmission of Classical Models in Private Roman Academies
• Susanne Müller-Bechtel (Munich/Würzburg), Das akademische Aktstudium – ein wichtiger Multiplikator der bildlichen Antikenrezeption
Coffee Break
2.45 (Mis-)Interpretations of Antiquity
Chair: Timo Strauch (BBAW)
• Anna Carrarini (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich), Copy or Creature? Die druckgraphische Verfremdung der Kapitolinischen Wölfin
• Ana Sofia Pinto (Marta Rocha Moreira / CENP, FAUP, Porto), Around the ‘tripode’: The Roman Meal, Revisited
• Norbert Franken (Berlin), Fallstudien: Stiche und Zeichnungen verschollener Altertümer im kritischen Vergleich
Coffee Break
4.45 Antique Architecture in Copy Chains in Drawing and Print
Chair: Arnold Nesselrath (Rome)
• Elena Efimova (Lomonossow University, Moscow), Les copies des dessins de la Renaissance par les maîtres du cercle de Cassiano dal Pozzo dans un album du XVIIe siècle à Saint-Pétersbourg
• Ruggero De Blasi (Università degli Studi di Genova, Genoa), Representing Obelisks in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Roman Prints: Practices of Copying and Reconfiguration
• Ana Šverko (Cvito Fisković Centre and University, Split), The Copy of a Transformed Original. The Temple of Jupiter in Split and a Case of Graphic Transmission
6.15 Closing Discussion
Study Days | Framing the Drawing – Drawing the Frame
This week at the Bibliotheca Hertziana:
Gernsheim Study Days: Framing the Drawing – Drawing the Frame
Online and in-person, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 13–15 May 2026
Organized by Tatjana Bartsch, Ariella Minden, and Johannes Röll
The 2026 Gernsheim Study Days will explore the relationship between early modern drawings, frames, and framing. Papers will consider both how the symbolic connotations associated with the frame in the early modern period functioned as part of artists’ generative creative processes as a cultural technique as well as the role that the physical act of framing drawings played within histories of collecting and reception. With this focus on the medium of drawing, this conference seeks to uncover new ways to think about the myriad semiotic potentials of the frame in the making and study of early modern art. Please follow the event online at https://vimeo.com/event/5864584
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14.00 Welcome and Opening Remarks
• Tatjana Bartsch (BHMPI) and Ariella Minden (University of St Andrews)
14.30 Section 1
Chair: Ariella Minden
• Reinier Baarsen (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam), Who Drew Frames?
• Furio Rinaldi (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Leonardo’s Border Lines
15.50 Coffee Break
16.10 Section 2
Chair: Silvia Massa (Kunstmuseum Basel)
• Elizabeth Merrill (Ghent University), Copy, Snip, Cut, Collage: Drawing Practices in the Workshop of Lambert Lombard
• Ludovico Maria Durante (Roma, Sovrintendenza Capitolina), Abitare la soglia: La cariatide come cornice incarnata nei disegni di Cherubino Alberti e Federico Zuccari
• Helen Barr (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main), Cornice / senza cornice / fuori cornice: Il libro de’ disegni di Francesco Morandini
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10.00 Section 3
Chair: Francesca Borgo (BHMPI)
• Laura Moretti (University of St Andrews), Framing the Disegno: Vincenzo Borghini’s Cultural Techniques and the Construction of the Vasarian Libro
• Vera Hendriks (The Hague, RKD — Netherlands Institute for Art History), Framing Authorship: Drawn Borders and Inscribed Frames in Eighteenth-Century Dutch Artists’ Portraits
11.20 Coffee Break
11.40 Section 4
Chair: Tatjana Bartsch
• Gudula Metze (Kupferstich-Kabinett – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Creative Collecting: A Group of Baroque Drawn Frames at the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett
• Elisabeth Oy-Marra (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), Le scritture ai margini: Sebastiano Resta e la doppia incorniciatura dei disegni
13.00 Lunch Break
14.00 Section 5
Chair: Anna Magnago Lampugnani (BHMPI)
• Thomas Pöpper (Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau, Angewandte Kunst Schneeberg), Passage, Access, Depth: Mounting as Framing–The Window Mount in Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo
• Giovanni Santucci (Università di Pisa), Mounting, Borders, and Meaning in the Talman Collection
15.20 Coffee Break
15.40 Section 6
Chair: Giorgio Marini (Roma, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica)
• Christoph Orth (Klassik Stiftung Weimar), Framing the Face: On the Role of Drawings in Lavater’s Ideas on Physiognomy
• Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A Persian Muraqqa and Pierre-Jean Mariette’s Mounted Drawings
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no streaming
10.00–13.00 Roundtable
Chair: Johannes Röll (BHMPI)
Lecture | Anne Lafont on Africaneries
From The Institute of Fine Arts:
Anne Lafont | Africaneries, or, Stylistic Dismemberment
Online and in-person, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 22 April 2026, 6pm
Scroll of a viola da gamba, late 18th century, Italy (Paris: Musée de la musique, D.AD.23470).
The European Enlightenment invented a new exoticism from within the Rococo tradition. Informed by the craftsmanship, lines, and colors of the Far East, European artisans appropriated motifs, imitated them, and revived them in contexts of refined metropolitan luxury. A geography of taste thus emerged—one might even speak of a qualitative hierarchy of stylistic skills operating at the peripheries of European empires, which served as major suppliers of materials and decorative schemes for the applied arts in eighteenth-century Delft, Meissen, London, and Paris. At the heart of this cultural economy of sophisticated objects, one motif stands out: miniaturized and, in most cases, objectified Black figures. These are what I propose to call Africaneries—artworks whose cultural roots and formal qualities dissolved in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, which accelerated the social and cultural death of Africans. My central question is this: how was the thread severed that once connected so-called African fetishes to the material culture of Black people in the Americas and, ultimately, to the decorative objects known as au Nègre in imperial Europe? In this experimental study, I attempt to restore the connections between these various objects of the early modern Black Atlantic.
Part of the Conversations in Modern European Art series.
Anne Lafont is an art historian and professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS). She is interested in material culture and aesthetics of the Black Atlantic and researches notion of African art in historiography. In 2019, she published a book entitled L’art et la Race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières (to be published in English by the Getty Institute in 2027: Art and Race: The African (up) against the Enlightenment’s Eye) and participated in the exhibition Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (Musée d’Orsay). During the 2021–22 academic year, she was Clark Professor in Williamstown and was awarded the Iris Foundation Award by the Bard Graduate Center for outstanding mid-career scholar. With François-Xavier Fauvelle, she co-edited the book L’Afrique et le monde: Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle (La découverte, 2022). Her latest book is a collection of articles published in Brazil: A Arte dos mundos negros: historia, teoria, critica (Bazar do Tempo, 2023). She is now researching circulations of African objects in early modern Europe at the time of slavery as their presence and reception gave grounding to the conceptualization of fetishism in Western humanities (to be published in 2027). Another book in the making addresses how the Black Lives Matter movement specifically impacted the politics of French Heritage.
Symposium | (In)Visible Faces
From Syracuse University:
(In)Visible Faces: The Politics of Portraiture and Social Change, 1700–the Present
Online and in-person, Syracuse University, 26–27 March 2026
The 2025–2026 Ray Smith Symposium features a two-day conference that focuses on portraiture, the British empire, and the visual legacies of imperial portraiture in our current times. Building on a recently discovered 18th-century portrait of a Mrs. Seaforth painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy in London, the symposium will analyze portraiture, textile trade, and the East India Company on the first day, before shifting to print culture, photography, media, and social justice on the second day. Bringing together curators from the Syracuse University Art Museum (in whose collections Reynolds’s ‘lost’ painting was found) and Special Collections Research Center, as well as art historians, historians, curators, art and textile conservators, and communication scholars, the symposium will feature keynote lectures by acclaimed art historian Tim Barringer (Yale University) and renowned social psychologist Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta (University of Massachusetts Amherst).
Co-sponsored by Art and Music Histories. Chemistry. CODE^SHIFT. English. Goldring Arts, Style and Culture Journalism. History. Lender Center for Social Justice. Light Work. Premodern Global Studies. Ray Smith Symposium. South Asia Center. Syracuse University Art Museum. Syracuse University Humanities Center. Syracuse University Libraries. The Alexia at Newhouse. Women’s and Gender Studies. Psychology. The Rubin Family Foundation.
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Joshua Reynolds, Tuccia, The Vestal Virgin, 1786, oil on panel (Syracuse University Art Museum, gift of Theodore Newhouse, 1968.329).
11.30 Welcome
11.45 Session 1
Moderator: Radha Kumar
• Robert Travers (Cornell University) — The Return of the Nabob: Richard Barwell and Warren Hastings in 1780s Britain
• Melinda Watt (Art Institute of Chicago) — The Lore and Allure of Woven Air
12.35 Session 2
Moderator: Irina Savinetskaya
• Debarati Sarkar (CUNY Graduate Center) — ‘My Black Servant Juba’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Earliest South Asian Ayah Portrait in 18th-Century Britain
• Jennifer Germann (Independent Scholar and Affiliated Scholar, Institute for European Studies, Cornell University) — Dressing up Dido: Constructions of Gender, Race, and Social Rank in the Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray
1.30 Lunch Break
2.40 Session 3
Moderator: Jeffrey Mayer
• Amelia Rauser (Franklin and Marshall College) — Veritable Athenians: How Artistic Dress Became Neoclassical Fashion
• Joanna Marschner (Historic Royal Palaces) — Muslin in Western Fashion in the Later 18th Century: Lady Rockingham’s Muslin Sack-Back Dress c.1775, A Case-Study
3.30 Session 4
Moderator: Kate Holohan
• Raphael Shea (Westlake Art Conservation Center) — A Considered Approach to the Conservation Treatment of Reynolds’s Tuccia, The Vestal Virgin
• Kirsten Schoonmaker (Syracuse University) — Muslin, Magnified: Material Evidence in Local Collections
4.20 Tea and Coffee Break
5.00 Keynote Lecture
Moderator: Junko Takeda
• Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University) — A Suitable Ornament: Reynolds, the Royal Academy, and the British Empire
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10.00 Welcome
10.10 Session 5 — virtual
Moderator: Durba Ghosh
• Adam Eaker (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) — Two New Indian Portraits for the Met
• Alice Insley (Tate Britain) — TBA
11.00 Session 6
Moderator: Romita Ray
• Melissa Yuen (Syracuse University Art Museum) — ‘And every body may know her’: The Display and Circulation of Mrs. Seaforth’s Image as Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin
• Elizabeth Mitchell (McNay Art Museum) — Anatomy of an Exhibition: From Reynolds to Warhol and Back Again
11.50 Lunch Break
2.15 Keynote Lecture
Moderator: Srividya ‘Srivi’ Ramasubramanian
• Nilanjana ‘Buju’ Dasgupta (Provost Professor and Inaugural Director, Institute of Diversity Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst) — How ‘Wallpaper’ Creates Inequality: A Science-Driven Approach to Change It
3.30 Closing Remarks
3.35 Tea, Coffee, Conversation
Lecture | Ana Lucia Araujo on the Work of Black Artists in the Americas
From The Institute of Fine Arts:
Ana Lucia Araujo | The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas
Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series
Online and in-person, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 30 March 2026, 6pm
Iron crown, 34 × 45 cm, Real Fábrica de Ferro São João do Ipanema (Museu Paulista, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil).
Throughout human history, men and women have used artistic expression to overcome the most horrible atrocities. Africans and their descendants also embraced artistic creation to survive the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas, and to soothe their physical and spiritual wounds. Drawing on written and visual primary sources, artifacts, and artworks housed in archives and museums in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, my book The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas combines history, art history, and art to tell the story of enslaved artists and examine the works they created in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue that Black creators drew on the long and powerful heritage of African arts and knowledge, which they combined with European and Native American artistic traditions, to design artworks and objects that asserted a defying world of their own.
Many enslaved and freed artists modeled clay objects, forged magnificent iron pieces, wove textiles, mats, and baskets, carved wood and stone sculptures. These artists embraced the knowledge transmitted to them by their African ancestors, while also introducing innovations learned from European and indigenous creators. Drawing on these rich economic and cultural exchanges, African artists and their descendants in the Americas adapted and developed new techniques and combinations of forms and colors. When creating new artworks, these artists also embraced new materials to which they assigned new uses and meanings. I contend that artistic creation offered bondspeople relief and hope, and sometimes also opened to them a path to emancipation. Ultimately, by shedding new light on the works of enslaved Africans and their descendants, which still remain largely invisible in most museum collections, The Power of Art illuminates their long-lasting contributions to the development of visual arts in the Americas.
Registration is available here»
Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and the global African diaspora. Trained as a historian and as an art historian, she has explored the legacies of slavery, including the history of calls for reparations, memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. Her recent books are Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024), The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury, 2017, 2023). A John Solomon Guggenheim Fellow (2025), her work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at Universität Bonn (Germany), the Clark Art Institute, and the American Philosophical Society.
Online Conversation | Architecture’s Archive, 1400–1800
From the Society of Architectural Historians:
Architecture’s Archive: Paperwork in Early Modern Practice, 1400–1800
With Christine Casey, Farshid Emami, Eleonora Pistis, and Saundra Weddle
Online, An SAH Connects Session, Friday, 20 March 2026, noon EST
From drawings and invoices to maps, inventories, and account books, early modern architectural practice abounded with paperwork. These documents emerged from a historical moment beginning around 1400 that witnessed the rise of new technologies and regimes for the management of information. While essential to historical scholarship, documents have long been taken for granted merely as sources to mine for data. Towards a fuller view of paperwork, this SAH Connects event invites a reframing of documents as spatial objects whose form, use, content, and production merit critical consideration.
Documents call attention to questions of process but also, more generally, the material realities of building in the early modern world. Panelists will speak about the historiographic and methodological stakes of a document that has animated their scholarship. Among the questions to be considered are: What do documents clarify or obscure? How did documents serve institutions, particular those that oversaw building activity? How did architectural documents circulate? What new possibilities do documents provide for uncovering non-elite figures or extra-architectural actors who shaped the built environment? Who is absent from documents? What temporal, material, or scalar slippages exist between documents and buildings? How do we wrestle with fragmentary or compromised documentary evidence? While anchored in the early modern world, this conversation will invite broad critical reflection on the documentary sources that underpin architectural history.
With the goal of highlighting new work, we have invited authors whose recently published books engage with a variety of building cultures at a range of scales from across the early modern world. Speaking from their books, each participant will discuss a single historical document that was central to their analysis of the actors, systems and processes that shaped the built environment.
• Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin | Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Yale University Press, 2025).
• Farshid Emami, Rice University | Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State Press, 2024).
• Eleonora Pistis, Columbia University | Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (Harvey Miller, 2024).
• Saundra Weddle, Drury University | The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State Press, 2026).
The session will be moderated by Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Ann C. Huppert (University of Washington), and Kristin Triff (Trinity College).
Registration is available here»
SAH CONNECTS, a year-round series of virtual programs related to the history of the built environment, provides a platform for the SAH community to collaborate, share their work, engage in timely discussions, and reach worldwide audiences.
Symposium | El Prado en femenino III: Queen Isabel de Farnesio
Next month from The Prado, with some simultaneous translation planned:
Key Women in the Creation of the Collections of the
Museo del Prado III: Isabel de Farnesio
Online and in-person, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 9–10 March 2026
Organized by Noelia García Pérez
Jean Ranc, Isabel de Farnesio, 1723, oil on canvas, 144 × 115 cm (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado).
It was probably Queen Isabel de Farnesio (1692–1766), patron of the arts, who most decisively contributed to giving shape to the Museo del Prado’s collections. This third edition of the series Protagonistas femeninas en la formación de las colecciones del Museo del Prado invites us to reconsider the significance of her patronage and her pivotal contribution to the artistic collection that the Museum now preserves. As in previous editions, this scientific meeting was designed with the intention of recovering, studying, and disseminating the cultural agency of the women of Europe’s royal houses, whose collections and artistic decisions have left a profound imprint on the identity of the Museum.
Throughout the sessions, a group of notable national and international specialists will examine the political, cultural, and dynastic context in which Elisabeth Farnese advanced her patronage; the mechanisms through which she built her public image as queen consort in the exercise of her power; the complex network of mediators that made the realization of her collections possible; and her extraordinary relevance in the fields both of painting and classical sculpture. From an initial analysis of the interests of other queenly European patrons—for instance, Maria Theresa of Austria, Catherine II, and Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz—to a specific consideration of Isabel de Farnesio’s own collecting activities, this symposium invites reflection on female artistic agency in the Modern Age and its impact on the circulation of works, the promotion of artists, and the consolidation of new narratives of power.
As complementary activities, the meeting will include the screening of a documentary dedicated to Isabel de Farnesio and a visit to the exhibition El Prado en femenino III. The exhibition explores the legacy this queen passed on, underscoring how her work in the field of artistic promotion definitively contributed to enriching the Museum’s collection. With this initiative, the Museo del Prado consolidates an essential line of work that explores the actions of these queens who made possible an essential part of the legacy that we are fortunate to continue to admire today.
m o n d a y , 9 m a r c h
9.30 Registration
10.00 Introductions
• Alfonso Palacio (Museo del Prado)
• Cristina Hernández Martín (Women’s Institute)
• Noelia García Pérez (University of Murcia)
10.30 Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art — Michael Yonan (University of California)
11.15 Power and Paint: The Patronage of Women Artists at the Court of Catherine II — Rosalind Polly Blakesley (University of Cambridge)
12.30 Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz: How a Queen Promoted Both Art and Female Artists in English Society — Heidi A. Strobel (University of North Texas)
16.00 Round table | Isabel de Farnesio: A Queen Consort in the Exercise of Power
Moderator: Carlos González Navarro (Museo del Prado)
• María de los Ángeles Semper (University of Barcelona)
• Giulio Sodano (Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
• Pablo Gestal (Sorbonne Université, Centre Roland Mousnier)
17.00 Round table | The Patronage of Isabel de Farnesio: State of the Art
Moderator: Ana González Mozo (Museo del Prado)
• Ángel Aterido (Complutense University of Madrid)
• Antonio Iommelli (Farnese Palace Museums)
t u e s d a y , 1 0 m a r c h
10.00 Isabel de Farnesio en las colecciones del Museo del Prado — Noelia García Pérez (University of Murcia)
10.45 Round table | The Construct of the Image of the Queen: From Molinaretto to Van Loo
Moderator: Noelia García Pérez
• Sandra Antúnez (Complutense University of Madrid)
• Andrés Úbeda (Museo del Prado)
• Mercedes Simal (University of Jaén)
12.00 Round table | From Christina of Sweden to Isabel de Farnesio: Collections of Classical Sculpture
Moderator: Ana Martín (Museo del Prado)
• Manuel Arias (Museo del Prado)
• Juan Ramón Sánchez del Peral (Museo del Prado)
• Mercedes Simal (University of Jaén)
16.00 El boceto de Santa Ana enseñando a leer a la Virgen: La sustracción y retorno del boceto de Murillo del Museo del Prado — Benito Navarrete (Complutense University of Madrid)
16.45 Screening of the documentary
17.15 Viewing of the exhibition The Female Perspective III
Enfilade 
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