New Book | Highland Retreats
From Rizzoli:
Mary Miers, Highland Retreats: The Architecture and Interiors of Scotland’s Romantic North (New York: Rizzoli, 2017), 288 pages, ISBN: 978 08478 44760, $65.
Featuring breathtaking photographs of some of Scotland’s most remarkable and little-known houses, this book tells the story of how incomers adopted the North of Scotland as a recreational paradise and left an astonishing legacy of architecture and decoration inspired by the romanticized image of the Highlands. Known as shooting lodges because they were designed principally to accommodate the parties of guests that flocked north for the annual sporting season, these houses range from Picturesque cottages ornées and Scotch Baronial castles to Arts and Crafts mansions and modern eco-lodges. While their designs respond to some of Britain’s wildest and most stirring landscapes, inside many were equipped with the latest domestic technology and boasted opulent decoration and furnishings from the smartest London and Parisian firms. A good number survive little altered in their original state, and some are still owned by descendants of the families that built them.
Images from the famous Country Life Picture Library and specially commissioned photographs evoke the dramatic settings and arresting detail of these houses, making the book as appealing to decorators and architectural historians as it is to travelers and sportsmen.
Mary Miers commutes between her home in the Scottish Highlands and the London offices of Country Life magazine, where she works as fine arts and books editor. Her books include American Houses: The Architecture of Fairfax & Sammons and The English Country House.
Paul Barker was one of England’s premier interior and architectural photographers, whose books included English Country House Interiors, The Drawing Room, and English Ruins.
New Book | Travel and the British Country House
From Oxford UP:
Jon Stobart, ed., Travel and the British Country House: Cultures, Critiques, and Consumption in the Long Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 272 pages, ISBN: 978 15261 10329, $115.
Travel and the British Country House explores the ways in which travel by owners, visitors, and material objects shaped country houses during the long eighteenth century. It provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of this relationship and how it varied according to the identity of the traveller and the geography of their journeys. The essays explore how travel on the Grand Tour, and further afield, formed an inspiration to build or remodel houses and gardens, the importance of country house visiting in shaping taste amongst British and European elites, and the practical aspects of travel, including the expenditure involved. Suitable for a scholarly audience, including postgraduate and undergraduate students, but also accessible to the general reader, Travel and the British Country House offers a series of fascinating studies of the country house that serve to animate the country house with flows of people, goods and ideas.
Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University.
C O N T E N T S
1 Introduction: Travel and the British Country House, Jon Stobart
2 From Rome to Stourhead and Thence to Rome Again: The Phenomenon of the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Garden, John Harrison
3 Virtual Travel and Virtuous Objects: Chinoiserie and the Country House, Emile de Bruijn
4 Gentlemen Tourists in the Early Eighteenth Century: The Travel Journals of William Hanbury and John Scattergood, Rosie MacArthur
5 A Foreign Appreciation of English Country Houses and Castles: Dutch Travel Accounts on Proto Museums Visited en Route, 1683–1855, Hanneke Ronnes and Renske Koster
6 ‘Worth Viewing by Travellers’: Arthur Young and Country House Picture Collections in the Late Eighteenth Century, Jocelyn Anderson
7 ‘Enjoying Country Life to the Full—Only the English Know How To Do That!’: Appreciation of the British Country House by Hungarian Aristocratic Travellers, Kristof Fatsar
8 Magnificent and Mundane: Transporting People and Goods to the Country House, c. 1730–1800, Jon Stobart
9 On the Road (and the Thames) with William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire 1597–1623, Peter Edwards
10 ‘No Lady Could Do This’: Navigating Gender and Collecting Objects in India and Scotland, c. 1810–50, Ellen Filor
Index
Call for Manuscripts | Costume Society of America Book Series
Costume Society of America Book Series
Series Editor: Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
The Costume Society of America book series has a new home at Kent State University Press. Inquiries and proposals for works on all subjects relating to the history and conservation of costume and adornment are welcome. Books chosen to be published range from scholarly to general interest and vary widely in format, from primarily textual to highly illustrated.
Although all titles must pass a rigorous review in terms of substance, not all must be scholarly. The Series also considers books that address or embrace a general readership. Titles in this category must be well written and focused on their specific subjects as well as carefully researched and substantiated, but they cannot become too deeply entrenched in theory or jargon for the average reader.
To request consideration of your proposed or completed manuscript, please send a query letter or brief prospectus to Series Editor Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell at kchrismancampbell@hotmail.com. Full details and a list of previous books in the series can be found here.
Research Seminar | Greg Smith on Thomas Girtin
From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Gregory Smith | Thomas Girtin: An Online Catalogue, Archive, and Introduction to the Artist
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 8 November 2017
Thomas Girtin, Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island, Northumberland, 1796–97, watercolor, 38 × 52 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
I will begin by outlining the scope at the outset of a major project to produce an online catalogue covering the drawings, watercolours, and prints by, and after, the short lived but highly productive artist, Thomas Girtin (1775–1802). There are three categories of his works which pose a particular challenge to any cataloguer: the many hundreds of watercolours that he made in collaboration with fellow practitioners; the numerous copies or creative variations that Girtin produced after the works of contemporary artists, both professional and amateur, and after earlier landscape and topographical prints; and, finally, watercolours where the ostensible topographical subject has been lost or effaced as a result of Girtin’s ambitions to transcend the status of his chosen medium. Each of the three categories of problem works pose different challenges, which I will explore through a series of case studies before concluding that, despite the new research opportunities opened up by online searches and the mass digitisation of works on paper, a Girtin catalogue must, by necessity, admit a healthy degree of uncertainty and a fluidity at its margins. 8 November 2017, 6:00–8:00pm.
Greg Smith is an independent art historian who has published extensively on the history of British watercolours and watercolourists, as well as landscape artists working in Italy. He has also worked as a curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, the Design Museum, London, and the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham. He has organised exhibitions on the work of Thomas Girtin (Tate Britain), Thomas Jones (National Gallery of Wales), and Thomas Fearnley (Barber Institute of Fine Art). As Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Greg is developing a major online project: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist.
New Book | William Hunter
From Routledge:
Helen McCormack, William Hunter and His Eighteenth-Century Cultural Worlds: The Anatomist and the Fine Arts (New York: Routledge, 2017), 208 pages, ISBN: 978 14724 24426, $150.
The eminent physician and anatomist Dr William Hunter (1718–1783) made an important and significant contribution to the history of collecting and the promotion of the fine arts in Britain in the eighteenth century. Born at the family home in East Calderwood, he matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1731 and was greatly influenced by some of the most important philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Hunter quickly abandoned his studies in theology for Medicine and, in 1740, left Scotland for London where he steadily acquired a reputation as an energetic and astute practitioner; he combined his working life as an anatomist successfully with a wide range of interests in natural history, including mineralogy, conchology, botany, and ornithology; and in antiquities, books, medals, and artefacts; in the fine arts, he worked with artists and dealers and came to own a number of beautiful oil paintings and volumes of extremely fine prints. He built an impressive school of anatomy and a museum which housed these substantial and important collections. William Hunter’s life and work is the subject of this book, a cultural-anthropological account of his influence and legacy as an anatomist, physician, collector, teacher, and demonstrator. Combining Hunter’s lectures to students of anatomy with his teaching at the St Martin’s Lane Academy, his patronage of artists, such as Robert Edge Pine, George Stubbs, and Johan Zoffany, and his associations with artists at the Royal Academy of Arts, the book positions Hunter at the very centre of artistic, scientific, and cultural life in London during the period, presenting a sustained and critical account of the relationship between anatomy and artists over the course of the long eighteenth century.
Helen McCormack is a Lecturer in Art, Design, History and Theory at Glasgow School of Art. She studied Art History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the History of Design and Material Culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, London. She was the David Carritt Scholar in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow where she completed her PhD on the subject of William Hunter as a collector of the fine arts.
C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Art, Science, Curiosity and Commerce
1 Forming the Museum: Context and Chronology
2 The Great Windmill Street Anatomy School and Museum
3 Patronage and Patriots: Hunter and a National School of Artists
4 Collecting Ambitions (1770–83) The Grand Tour Paintings
5 Pursuing the Imitation of Nature in and beyond the Royal Academy of Arts
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
New Book | Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism
From Oxford UP:
John Levi Barnard, Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 248 pages, ISBN: 978 019066 3599, $75.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an “empire for liberty,” for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an “empire of slavery,” inexorably devolving into an “empire of ruin.” Washington architecture.
John Levi Barnard is an Assistant Professor of English at The College of Wooster.
Introduction
1 Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State
2 In Plain Sight: Slavery and the Architecture of Democracy
3 Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory
4 Crumbling into Dust: Conjure and the Ruins of Empire
5 National Monuments and the Residue of History
Call for Papers | The Cultural Heritage of Europe @ 2018
From H-ArtHist:
The Cultural Heritage of Europe @ 2018: Re-Assessing a Concept, Re-Defining Its Challenges
Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Paris, 4–5 June 2018
Proposals due by 10 November 2017
Today’s globalized concept of cultural heritage is often understood as a product of European modernity with its 19th-century emergence of territorially fixed nation-states and collective identity constructions. Within the theoretical overlap of the disciplines of history (of art), archaeology and architecture cultural properties and built monuments were identified and embedded into gradually institutionalized protection systems. In the colonial context up to the mid-20th century this specific conception of cultural heritage was transferred to non-European contexts, internationalized in the following decades after the WWII and taken as universal.
Postcolonial, postmodern, and ethnically pluralistic viewpoints did rightly question the supposed prerogative of a European Leitkultur. Only rather recently did critical heritage studies engage with the conflicting implications of progressively globalized standards of cultural heritage being applied in very local, non-European and so-called ‘traditional’ contexts. However, in order to bridge what academia often tends to essentialize as a ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ divide of opposing heritage conceptions, a more balanced viewpoint is also needed in order to update the conceptual foundations of what ‘cultural heritage of/in Europe’ means today.
The European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 — A Campaign with Unquestioned Assumptions?
Right at the peak of an identity crisis of Europe with financial fiascos of whole nation states, military confrontations, and refortified state borders at its continental peripheries with inflows of refugees from the Near East and the Global South did the European Council and Parliament representatives reach a provisional agreement to establish a European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018. With affirmative slogans such as “We Europeans” and “Our common European heritage”, the campaign intends to “raise awareness of European history and values, and strengthen a sense of European identity” (Press release of the European Council, 9 February 2017). However, with its unquestioned core assumption of the validity of Europe’s territorial status with simply interconnected borderlines of its affiliated member states and of a given collective ‘we’-identity within the European Union, this cultural-political campaign risks to miss the unique chance of a critical re-assessment of how a ‘European’ dimension of cultural heritage can be conceptualized in today’s globalized and inter-connected reality.
The ‘Cultural Heritage of Europe’ @ 2018 — Towards a Global and Transcultural Approach
The global and transcultural turn in the disciplines of art and architectural history and cultural heritage studies helps to question the supposed fixity of territorial, aesthetic, and artistic entity called Europe, more precisely the taxonomies, values and explanatory modes that have been built into the ‘European’ concept of cultural heritage and that have taken as universal.
By taking into consideration the recent processes of the accelerated exchange and global circulation of people, goods and ideas, the conference aims to reconstitute the old-fashioned units of analysis of what ‘European cultural heritage’ could be by locating the European and the non-European in a reciprocal relationship in order to evolve a non-hierarchical and broader conceptual framework. With a focus on cultural properties (artefacts), built cultural heritage (from single architectures, ensembles and sites to whole city- and cultural landscapes etc.), and their forms of heritagization (from archives, museums, collections to cultural reserves), case-studies for the conference can address the various forms of the ‘cultural’ within heritage: its ‘social’ level (actors, stakeholders, institutions etc.), its ‘mental’ level (concepts, terms, theories, norms, categories), and, most obviously, its ‘physical’ level with a view on manipulative strategies (such as transfer and translation, reuse and mimicry, replication and substitution etc.).
Grouped along four panels in two days, cases-studies should question the concept of cultural heritage with its supposedly ‘European’ connotations and dimensions within artefacts and monuments by destabilizing at least one of its four constitutive core dimensions:
1) Place and Space – from stable sites to multi-sited, transborder contact zones and ambivalent third spaces
2) Substance and Materiality – from the monumental, homogeneous and unique of the artefact and listed monument to the transient, multiple, visual, digital, commemorated etc.
3) Time and Temporality – from objects of permanence and stability to the temporal, ephemeral, fugitive, processual
4) Identity – from the collective and cohesive to the ambivalent, contested, plural, and/or partial and fragmentary
The Host and the Network, Dates, and Deadlines
This international two-day conference in French and English will take place on 4 and 5 June 2018 at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) and is embedded into the Laboratory of Excellence (LabEx) ‘Writing a New History of Europe—Ècrire une Histoire Nouvelle de l’Europe’ at Sorbonne University. One of its seven thematic axes—entitled ‘National Traditions, Circulation and Identities in European Art’—acts as the principle host of the event: with a special focus on geography, historiography and cultural heritage, it looks at art history in the Labex perspective of finding both elements of explanations and answers to the crisis Europe is currently going through. Is conducted by the Centre André Chastel (the Research Laboratory of Art History under the tutelage of the National Center for Scientific Research/CNRS, Sorbonne University and the Ministry of Culture) as the co-sponsor of the conference. Finally, the conference is situated within the new Observatoire des Patrimoines (OPUS) of the united Sorbonne Universities.
The conference is conceived by Michael Falser, Visiting Professor for Architectural History and Cultural Heritage Studies at Paris-Sorbonne (2018), in association with Dany Sandron, Professor of Art History at Sorbonne University/Centre Chastel and speaker of LabEx, axis 7.
Abstracts with name and affiliation of the speaker, title and 200 words abstract of the presentation are due with the deadline of 10 November. Candidates will be notified on 30 November 2017. The proposals for papers should be sent to patrimoine.europe2018@gmail.com.
Le Patrimoine Culturel de l’Europe @ 2018: Réexaminer un concept – redéfinir ses enjeux
Lecture | Iris Moon on the Late Shipwrecks of Jean Pillement
Jean Pillement, A Shipwreck, 1782, pastel on paper (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
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Iris Moon | Rococo Adrift: The Late Shipwrecks of Jean Pillement
University College London, 18 October 2017
Dr. Iris Moon (European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
The lecture is part of UCL’s visual culture research seminar Past Imperfect, which aims to explore recent concerns with time: the unfinished past, the future present, the over investment in the contemporary. This year’s theme is Destruction and Demolition.
Seminar Room 6, 21 Gordon Square, London, 6:00–8:00pm
Exhibition | The King of Spain’s Grandchildren by Mengs
From the Uffizi Galleries:
The King of Spain’s Grandchildren: Anton Raphael Mengs at the Pitti Palace
Pitti Palace, Florence, 19 September 2017 — 7 January 2018
Curated by Matteo Ceriana and Steffi Roettgen
Anton Raphael Mengs, Double Portrait of the Archdukes Ferdinando (1769–1824) and Maria Anna (1770–1809) di Asburgo Lorena, 1770–71 (Florence: Uffizi Galleries).
Barely twenty days after the opening of an exhibition at the Uffizi devoted to the purchase of two preparatory paintings by Luca Giordano and Taddeo Mazzi, the Uffizi Galleries are now launching a second exhibition to present the prestigious acquisition of yet another important painting in 2016, by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), portraying Ferdinando and Maria Anna, two of the children of Archduke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine and of his consort María Luisa de Borbón y Sajonia, dressed in contemporary costume and depicted inside the Pitti Palace.
Eike D. Schmid: “The task of a living museum is to safeguard works of art, to preserve memory and to transmit culture through exhibitions and research, but also to allow its collections to ‘breathe’ with targeted additions closely linked to the story of the city, of its hinterland and of the collection of which they are going to become a part. Acquisitions, especially if they are so subtly motivated, are a crucial part of a museum’s life, particularly if they are the product of research guaranteeing both their provenance and a fertile interaction with the museum’s existing heritage.”
When this unfinished painting appeared on the antique market, it was instantly clear that it had to enter the collections of the Gallerie degli Uffizi so that we could showcase it in the Pitti Palace, because even if Anton Raphael Mengs did not paint the picture entirely in the palace, he certainly conceived it there. The young princes lived in the Pitti Palace with their family, under the watchful eye of governesses and tutors, of course, but more especially under that of their own parents, while the Boboli Garden was their playground.
We were eager to celebrate the new acquisition, which would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the Galleria Virgilio in Rome, with an exhibition illustrating the historical and artistic environment in which the portrait was painted.
Mengs was born in Bohemia but soon moved to the west, becoming an adoptive Italian and Spaniard. He sought permission from King Charles III of Spain to travel to Rome so that he could both work and pursue his study of Classical antiquities and of the great Renaissance artists, chiefly that of Raphael after whom he had been named. The Spanish King, who loved Italy and had once almost governed Tuscany himself (eventually becoming the King of Naples), granted Mengs permission to make the trip but only on condition that he send him portraits from Florence of his young grandchildren, the children of his daughter María Luisa de Borbón y Sajonia and of Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine. The pictures, loaned to the exhibition by the Museo del Prado where they normally hang, were painted while Mengs was in the Tuscan capital from April 1770 to January 1771. The portraits show us Pietro Leopoldo’s two extremely young children dressed in Spanish court attire with the marks of royalty (the Golden Fleece) in the traditional dress of the Infantes, as reported in the Gazzetta Toscana published on 29 September 1770. Once finished, but before they were packed up and shipped to the Spanish court, the portraits were shown to the Florentine public in the Pitti Palace, where they were much admired both for their sparkling technique and for their accurate rendering of the sitters’ features.
Anton Raphael Mengs, Double Portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand (1769–1824) and Maria Anna (1770–1809), 1770–71 (Madrid: Museo del Prado).
At the same time as Mengs was painting these portraits of the children for their grandfather, the Spanish King, however, he must also have produced the picture recently purchased by the Uffizi Galleries portraying Ferdinando and Anna Maria with a totally different approach and in a very different spirit. The two children portrayed here, looking happier than the children depicted in many of Mengs’s other works, are shown in contemporary clothing, and the choice of full, resonant hues such as the green and pink of their attire instantly reveals this new spirit. The prince is dressed in boy’s costume and the feather hat in his right hand is the kind of headgear one might have worn for strolling or hunting, thus introducing a touching note of daily intimacy into the picture—a far cry from the stiff, ceremonial approach evinced in the official portraits now in Madrid. The painting must have been very much to the liking of Pietro Leopoldo, a man of stern tastes, an enlightened sovereign, a reformer, in fact a thoroughly ‘modern’ (not to say bourgeois) monarch in both his public and his private life. We are drawn to the picture because we can not only see the lesson of Velázquez in it, but we actually get a foretaste of Goya, a great admirer of Mengs, and even of Manet.
Johan Zoffany, Francis I, Grand Duke of Tuscany of the House of Lorraine (1708–1765), 1775 (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum).
The official court portrait painter to Pietro Leopoldo, however, was another German—albeit a naturalised Englishman—called Johann Zoffany. The exhibition showcases the portrait that he painted of Pietro Leopoldo’s first-born son Francis, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany of the House of Lorraine, which was painted for Francis’s paternal grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and which has been loaned by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Having doffed the dazzling turquoise attire of a Spanish Infante, we discover him in the courtyard of the Pitti Palace leaning against the majestic rustication, a small man fairly split between his government duties, his arms and his studies. This very fine portrait, which has returned to Florence for the first time since it was despatched to Vienna, depicts a boy who, while he may appear a little melancholic, is already very much aware of his imperial destiny.
The exhibition opens with portraits of the sitters’ grandparents, parents, and little cousins from Naples and Parma and closes with the self-portraits of the two painters from the Uffizi’s celebrated collection: Mengs’s famous, heroic self-portrait, bursting with emotion even though it is not yet Romantic, and Zoffany’s subtly ironic self-portrait in which he portrays himself with his small dog a painting that will come as a pleasant surprise to visitors after being specially restored for the exhibition.
Matteo Ceriana and Steffi Roettgen, I Nipoti del Re di Spagna: Anton Raphael Mengs a Palazzo Pitti (Livorno: Sillabe, 2017), 184 pages, ISBN: 978 888347 9687, $35.
Call for Papers | Books of Drawings, 1550–1800
From H-ArtHist:
Libri di Disegni e Album di Disegni nell’Età Moderna, 1550–1800:
Nuove prospettive metodologiche e di esegesi storico-critica
Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome, 31 May — 1 June 2018
Proposals due by 9 December 2017
La netta distinzione tipologica e terminologica tra libri di disegni e album di disegni è stata dimostrata dalla storiografia artistica contemporanea sulla base di evidenze documentarie e letterarie italiane, cinque e seicentesche. Nell’Età moderna sono gli artisti stessi o i conoscitori del calibro di Filippo Baldinucci ad utilizzare l’espressione ‘libro de’ disegni’ per indicare le raccolte rilegate della produzione grafica di pittori, scultori o architetti, ben prima che i termini taccuino, carnet, skizzenbuch, note-book e simili, venissero introdotti più tardi dal collezionismo, dalla letteratura artistica e dalla storiografia.
Nella fase attuale, con l’espressione ‘libro di disegni’, drawing-book in inglese, si tende a indicare a book of original drawings in a bound volume (book, codex), consisting of one or more quires (gatherings), which are predominantly filled with drawings, irrespective of the age, intention and profession of a draughtsman … whether the structure has been consolidated before or after the drawing process, protected by a leather binding or a simple parchement or paper cover (Elen, 1995).
Mentre i libri di disegni, integri nella loro configurazione originaria, sono piuttosto rari o poco conosciuti e studiati (non ne esiste a oggi un censimento sistematico e ragionato), molto più numerosi sono gli album di disegni, monografici o collettanei, raccolti da eruditi, conoscitori, curatori e collezionisti nei secoli XVII–XIX, all’interno dei quali sono confluiti singoli fascicoli o singoli fogli provenienti da libri di disegni più antichi. La capillare presenza di libri di disegni e album di disegni, giunti in forme più o meno frammentarie e dopo molti passaggi proprietari nelle print rooms e nelle biblioteche di tutto il mondo, invitano oggi a indagarne e analizzarne compiutamente gli sviluppi storici delle forme, dei contenuti, delle funzioni, e a studiarli anche sotto gli aspetti della fortuna critica e materiale, della storia del gusto, del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo.
Il Workshop Internazionale si propone di porre in evidenza, attraverso i contributi originali dei maggiori specialisti dell’argomento, l’imprescindibile circolarità esistente tra la conoscenza e lo studio analitico dei ‘libri de’ disegni’ di singoli artisti e la conoscenza e lo studio analitico degli album di disegni formatisi in epoche successive, al fine di avanzare nuove e non ancora esplorate prospettive di ricerca, individuazione, classificazione tipologica, analisi storica, storico-critica, collezionistica e materiale, che possano contribuire ad ampliare la nostra comprensione del fenomeno, delle teoriche e delle prassi operative, soprattutto ma non solo di bottega e di matrice accademica, degli artisti italiani dell’Età moderna, e dei percorsi, il più delle volte molto articolati e complessi, di creazione e di costituzione delle raccolte e delle collezioni internazionali di grafica, a partire dalla dispersione del ricco patrimonio di volumi rilegati di disegni lasciati in eredità dagli artisti del passato.
Per le proposte di intervento, sono indicate di seguito alcune delle possibili linee di approfondimento:
• Questioni terminologiche e tipologiche tra fonti documentarie, letteratura artistica, prassi collezionistiche, storia dell’arte, archeologia del libro, connoisseurship;
• Codex, libro, album: disegni originali, modelli e copie d’après;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni: forme, funzioni, temi e soggetti;
• Analisi tipologica, strutturale, tecnica, materiale di uno o più libri e/o album di disegni, tra storia dell’arte e del disegno, archeologia del libro, scienza codicologica;
• Analisi funzionale, stilistica, iconografica di uno o più libri e/o album di disegni, tra storia dell’arte e del disegno, metodo del conoscitore, scienza dell’attribuzione;
• Le collezioni pubbliche e private di libri e album di disegni: gli allestimenti originali, le filiazioni, i percorsi di ricognizione e catalogazione, i progetti di digitalizzazione;
• Ipotesi di ricostituzione virtuale di libri di disegni italiani smembrati tra raccolte pubbliche e private;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni come fonti visive per la teorica e la pratica del disegno degli artisti italiani, tra la seconda metà del Cinquecento e il primo Ottocento;
• Libri di disegni e album di disegni come fonti visive per l’insegnamento e l’apprendimento del disegno, e per la trasmissione dei modelli e dei repertori visivi, dentro le botteghe, le accademie, gli ateliers;
• Disegni rilegati in volume e autonomia del disegno: il processo creativo dell’artista tra ricerca-ideazione autofondata e verifica-progetto dell’opera d’arte finita;
• Il ruolo di eruditi, conoscitori, collezionisti, conservatori dei secoli XVII–XIX nella formazione delle raccolte e album di disegni, tra fortuna critica e fortuna materiale, dinamiche del gusto, del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo pubblico e privato.
Gli studiosi sono invitati a far pervenire, entro e non oltre il 9 dicembre 2017, le proposte di intervento—un abstract di max 500 caratteri (spazi inclusi) in italiano o in inglese—al seguente indirizzo di posta elettronica: drawingsbook.abaroma2018@gmail.com. Entro il 20 dicembre 2017, a seguito della selezione svolta dal Comitato Scientifico, l’accettazione degli interventi prescelti sarà comunicata via email agli interessati.
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