Call for Papers | Carlo Fontana (1638–1714), A Celebrated Architect
Carlo Fontana (1638–1714), A Celebrated Architect
Palazzo Carpegna, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome, 22–23 October 2014
Proposals due by 15 February 2014
The conference is dedicated to the architect Carlo Fontana (Rancate 1638 – Roma 1714) on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of his death. The protagonist of Roman architecture as the Baroque was waning, Fontana—descending from a famous dynasty of Ticinese architects—organized the teaching and the practice of architecture based on the exercise of drawing and geometry. His workshop thus prefigured modern design studios. The propagandistic usage of graphic sheets and printed volumes illustrating and diffusing Fontana’s works and ideas constituted yet another factor of his modernity. In fact, Fontana understood perfectly the dimension of intellectual and creative freedom of print, liberating himself from a dependence on patrons and from morphological and typological conventions of his time.
The projects of Carlo Fontana range from artifacts of domestic use, interiors, civil, religious and military architecture to the most challenging urban and territorial infrastructures (ports, aqueducts, grain warehouses, etc.). These design and entrepreneurial features are comparable, then, to the great architectural studios of the 19th and 20th century, confirming Fontana’s actuality. Such an innovative organization of his workshop attracted students from all over Europe: Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nicodemus Tessin, Lucas von Hildebrandt, Filippo Juvarra, Francesco Specchi, and James Gibbs, to name a few. In Fontana’s studio, students could learn innovative typologies, modern and experimental techniques, at the same time measuring themselves up to the great Roman construction tradition, both ancient and modern. Their direct contact with monuments was favored by the works Fontana executed on antique buildings to make them fit for new usages and new representations.
Proposals should thus encompass and explore, but by no means be limited to, the above mentioned aspect always bearing in mind the cosmopolite and European horizon that characterizes the production, the teaching and the thought of architect Carlo Fontana. Abstracts (3000 characters with spaces) together with a short CV (500 characters with spaces) containing principal publications, should be sent by e-mail with the subject CFP-Fontana before 15 February 2014 to Giuseppe Bonaccorso at the following addresses: convegnofontana2014@gmail.com; bonaccorso@ing.uniroma2.it.
Languages: Italian and English
Call for Papers | British Country Houses, CAA in 2014
Historians of British Art Session at CAA 2014 in Chicago
British Country Houses: Architecture, Collections, and Gardens
Chicago, Thursday, 13 February 2014, 12:30–2:00
Proposals due by 10 January 2014
In a spirit of nimble experimentation, the Historians of British Art invite proposals for an informal lunchtime session in Chicago at the 2014 meeting of the College Art Association on the subject of “British Country Houses: Architecture, Collections, and Gardens.” As a midday session, it is open to the public without the usual CAA membership or conference registration requirements. Speakers need belong only to HBA (or become a member soon!). Extended abstracts will be available digitally before the conference to encourage more productive discussion during the 90-minute slot.
Papers might address material aspects as well as larger contextual approaches that situate particular families and houses within narratives of patronage, the history of taste, or British identity. Please email a 200-word proposal and a CV to CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com by 10 January 2014. In light of the unusually quick turn-around, early responses are encouraged. Questions are most welcome.
Call for Papers | Eighteenth-Century Europe at MAHS in St. Louis
Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference 2014
Open Session: Eighteenth-Century Europe
Saint Louis Art Museum, 3–5 April 2014
Proposals due by 16 December 2013 — extended to 2 January 2014
CAAH members are invited to submit proposals for sessions at the Midwest Art History Society Annual Conference, which will convene in St. Louis, April 3-5, 2014 at the Saint Louis Art Museum. In addition to five thematic sessions, there are seventeen ‘open’ sessions addressing broad periods and general topics. This session on Eighteenth-Century Europe invites papers on all aspects of the art, architecture, and decorative arts of the period. Please email a 200-word proposal and a CV to CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com by 16 December 2013. Questions are most welcome.
Conference | Persistent Spaces: 18th- and 19th-Century Cities
From the conference website:
Persistent Spaces: Politics, Aesthetics and Topography
in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century City
Université Paris Diderot, 12–13 December 2013
Keynote speakers: Lynda Nead (Birkbeck College) and Stéphane Van Damme (Sciences Po Paris)
The aim of this two-day postgraduate conference is to bring together young researchers to explore the city and its ideologies from a fully interdisciplinary perspective. We would like to combine approaches from the fields of literature and the arts, sociology, philosophy, law, science and engineering in order to create a dialogue between disciplines and methodologies. This conference would also establish a dialogue between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We will seek to highlight the individual specificities of these two periods, but also to understand the echoes, continuities and breaks between them. From the Enlightenment to the late nineteenth century and before urbanism was fully established as a discipline, the city was constantly being configured and reconfigured by the joint influences of architects, civil engineers, political organizations, associations and the informal “practices” of inhabitants. Writers and artists also played a major part in this process, both picking up on these developments and changing them through the aesthetics they deployed. We would like to study this topography of struggle. The conference will shed light on the city as a site of conflicting and interpenetrating layers, changing yet also persisting through time and space, and continually shaped by tensions between authority and resistance.
T H U R S D A Y , 1 2 D E C E M B E R
9.00 Registration, welcome, plenary address by Sara Thornton, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot
9.30 Panel 1: Urbanism and urban planning
Chair: Allan Potofsky, Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, Université Paris Diderot
• Simona Gîrleanu (Université de Marne-la-Vallée), ‘Capitals of the Enlightenment: London and Paris Improved’
• Yvonne Rickert (Philipps University of Marburg), ‘The Parisian “Place Louis XV”: The Effect of a Literary Clash on the Architectural Design’
10.30 Tea
11.00 Panel 2: Urban Experiences of poverty and pauperism
Chair: Ariane Fennetaux, Assistant Professor of Eighteenth-Century Cultural Studies, Université Paris Diderot
• Oliver Betts (University of York), ‘Disorderly Spaces: Homes in the Slums of London and Paris’
• George Currie (Queen Mary University of London), ‘Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Carlyle and Urban Pauperism’
12.00 Lunch
14.00 Panel 3: Instability of space, instability of self
Chair: Estelle Murail, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Cultural Studies, Université Paris-Diderot
• Alexandra Logvinova (European Humanities University), ‘The Structure of Urban Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century as the Basis of Subject’s Anxiety’
• Adrian Versteegh (New York University), ‘“Cycle in Epicycle, Orb in Orb”: Navigating the Thresholds, Passages and Nested Interiors of Nineteenth-Century Urban Literature’
15.00 Tea
15.30 Panel 4: Fragmented spaces and writing
Chair: Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London
• Alison Annunziata (University of Southern California), ‘Urban De-Enlightenment: A Russian’s Dark Journey through Paris and London at the Start of the French Revolution’
• Ushashi Dasgupta (St John’s College, University of Oxford), ‘“Is this an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?”: Dickens, Collins, and the Spatial Contexts of Crime’
• Robert Yeates (University of Exeter), ‘The Destruction of the City in Early Science Fiction’
17.00 Keynote address
Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence, ‘Archaeology of Modernity: Making Metropolitan Past Tangible and Persistent: Paris, London, New York’
F R I D A Y , 1 3 D E C E M B E R
9.30 Ariane Fennetaux (Université Paris Diderot), ‘Materializing History: Plebeian Women’s Pockets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century London’
10.30 Tea
11.00 Panel 5: Disorientating the Orient
Chair: Colin Jones, Professor of Eighteenth-Century French History, Queen Mary College, London, Fellow of the British Academy
• Michael Talbot (University of St Andrews), ‘Shifting Centres: The Political and Topographical Transformations of Ottoman Haifa, 1700–1900’
• Natalia Starostina (Emory University), ‘Paris Oriental, Carnal Pleasures and the Spaces of Desires in Defining the Mental Topography of Paris from Montesquieu to Maupassant and to Paul Morand’
12.00 Lunch
14.00 Panel 6: The city in science
Chair: Stéphane Van Damme, Professor of History of Science, European University Institute in Florence
• Lavinia Maddluno (University of Cambridge), ‘Spaces of Nature and Realms of Civilisation: Pavia between Politics, Scientific Practices and Natural Order in the Late Eighteenth Century’
• Mathieu Fernandez (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers), ‘Mapping the Third Dimension: Observing, Representing and Transforming Paris, 1750–1850’
15.00 Tea
15.30 Keynote address
Lynda Nead, Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, ‘The Tiger in the Smoke: The Fog of Modernity in Post-war London’
Call for Papers | Emblems and Enigma: The Heraldic Imagination
From the conference website:
Emblems and Enigma: The Heraldic Imagination
An Interdisciplinary Symposium at the Society of Antiquaries of London, 26 April 2014
Proposals due by 10 January 2014
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Time has transfigured them into / Untruth –Philip Larkin
In his 1844 short story “Earth’s Holocaust,” Nathaniel Hawthorne sees heraldic signs reaching “like lines of light” into the past, but also as encrypted and obsolete. Proliferating and arcane, unique, ubiquitous, and inscrutable, the heraldic has been a major presence across the arts since medieval times; yet it remains, culturally and critically, enigmatic.
The organisers of this interdisciplinary symposium, Professor Fiona Robertson (St Mary’s University College) and Dr Peter Lindfield (University of St Andrews) invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of the employment and perception of the heraldic in literature, history, art, architecture, design, fashion, and contemporary and historical practice.
The programme will include a keynote address by Professor Vaughan Hart (University of Bath); a special session on the heraldry of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey; and papers on eighteenth-century antiquaries’ exploration of the heraldic, and on heraldry in nineteenth-century British and American literature. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:
– the languages and grammar of heraldry
– armoiries parlantes, allusions and puns
– imaginary and fantastical heraldry
– decoration and display
– blazonry and identity: nations, groups, individuals
– mock- and sham-heraldics; parody and subversion
– practices of memory and memorialisation
– history, development, and modern practice
– blazon and the body
– heraldic revivalism; medievalism; romance
– enigma, error, and absence: the bar sinister and the blank shield
– individual designers, writers, and collectors
– gendered identity
– hierarchies of signs
– international and interdisciplinary perspectives
Proposals of 200 words should be sent to heraldics2014@gmail.com by 10 January 2014. More information can be found on the conference website. Fiona Robertson and Peter Lindfield plan to edit a collection of essays arising from the symposium.
Exhibition | Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum
From the Vatican Museums:
Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI
Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican Museums, Rome, 2 October 2013 — 4 January 2014
Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega
For the first time in over two hundred years, an exhibition will bring back to life in the Vatican the charm of the eighteenth-century collections of the Profane Museums at the time of Pius VI, before the Napoleonic requisitions. It offers a unique opportunity to see reunited, in their original museum context, works previously exhibited in the Museum and now conserved in prestigious international cultural institutions. The exhibition will open simultaneously with the new display of the historical collections of the Profane Museum.
The Profane Museum, the original nucleus of the collections of profane antiquities in the future complex of the Vatican Museums, was created by Clement XIII (Rezzonico, 1758–1769) and enriched with further collections and furnishings under Pius VI (Braschi, 1775–1799). The conclusion of this demanding restoration project, which involved the entire collection and its context, is an opportunity to imagine a momentary “homecoming” of a nucleus of antique gems and cameos, mounted in elaborate Neoclassical settings at the end of the eighteenth century, and a valuable numismatic collection of Greek, Etruscan and Roman exemplars. Involved in the dramatic wartime events of the Napoleonic period, these works were transported to France as a war indemnity following the assassination of General Mathurin-Léonard Duphot in Rome in 1798.
Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega, curator and assistant in the Department of Decorative Arts of the Vatican Museums, the exhibition Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI – presented in the evocative surroundings of the Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding – displays for the first time in over two hundred years works such as the Augustus Group, with its splendid portrait of the emperor in chalcedony, the famous Carpegna Cameo of magnificently engraved onyx depicting the Triumph of Bacchus, the “Delle Paste” Group, with a glass cameo pinax depicting the loves of Bacchus and Ariadne, and other Groups and cameos masterfully reinterpreted and infused with new life by Luigi Valadier, celebrated silversmith in Rome at the time of Pius VI. (more…)
Call for Papers | Galloping History
Galloping History
Ankara, Turkey, 16-19 April 2014
Proposals due by 20 December 2013
There would hardly be any exaggeration in assuming that horses have been one of the most important companions to humankind since the development of civilized societies. Horses and equine culture have played a great many roles in almost all historical epochs. Thus, historical inquiry has encountered this phenomenon in a diverse spectrum of fields, including but not limited to military, social, economic, cultural, and literary aspects of human life and its historical evolution. However, since the Industrial Revolution and the technological progress it brought about, especially in transportation, horses and equine culture gradually digressed from the realm of everyday life. The perception of horses and the culture associated with an interest in horses in the contemporary world, as being distinctive of a certain socio-economic class, undermines the true significance of humankind’s relationship with these animals.
For the purpose of elucidating this point, I. D. Bilkent University Department of History and Bilkent Historical Society are jointly organizing a symposium entitled Galloping History, whose scholarly framework utilizes horses and equine culture. Accompanied by relevant social activities, the symposium aims both to bring together the most recent scholarly research, thereby opening up new and innovative discussions in the field, and to enhance the dialog between the world of academia and a wider audience. The panels to take place on the 17th and 18th of April will focus on horses and equine culture in Ottoman, European and American history, in accordance with the Department of History tracks. Researchers in the field, graduate students of all levels and history enthusiasts are welcome to submit abstracts to be evaluated by a board comprising of the Department of History faculty.
During the course of the four-day event, all expenses at I.D. Bilkent University (accommodation and meals) will be covered, but the participants are otherwise responsible for their own travel expenses. The finalized schedule of events and panels will be shared with the participants soon after the evaluation of abstracts is completed. (more…)
New Book | The Reception of Titian in Britain from Reynolds to Ruskin
Papers from a 2011 conference have recently been published by Brepols:
Peter Humfrey, ed., The Reception of Titian in Britain from Reynolds to Ruskin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 258 pages, ISBN: 978-2503536750, 70€.
This volume comprises sixteen essays on the reception of Titian by British painters, collectors and critics in the long nineteenth century. The main focus falls on the first three decades of the century, in the aftermath of the exhibition of the celebrated Orléans collection in London in 1798–99. But the chronology extends from Reynolds and his contemporaries, around the time of the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, to the more diverse and complicated reactions of the Victorian age, and even into the twentieth century.
C O N T E N T S
• Peter Humfrey, Introduction: The Pre-History,
• Marin Postle, ‘That Titian of our times’: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the ‘Divine Titian’
• Jonathan Yarker, Copies and the Taste for Titian in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
• Stephen Lloyd, ‘So much is Titian the rage’: Titian, Copies and Artist-Collectors in London c.1790–1830
• Rosie Dias, Colour, Effect and the Formation of an English School of Painting
• Linda Borean, Sir Abraham Hume as Collector and Writer
• Philippa Simpson, Titian in Post-Orléans London
• Anne Lyles, Constable and Titian
• Tom Nichols, Hazlitt and Titian: Progress, Gusto and the (Dis)Pleasure of Painting
• Godfrey Evans, ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’: The Dukes of Hamilton and Titian
• Caroline Campbell, Titian in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
•William McKeown, Getting at ‘the mind of Titian’in Ruskin’s Modern Painters
• Jason Rosenfeld, Millais and the ‘luster of Titian’
• Jeremy Howard, Titian’s Rape of Europa: Its Reception in England and Sale to America
• Catherine Whistler, Merchants and Writers: The Ashmolean’s Titian Collection and Some Nineteenth-Century Owners
• Susanna Avery-Quash, Titian at the National Gallery, London: An Unchanging Reputation?
Exhibition | Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works
From The Met:
Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014
Curated by Fernando Mazzocca and Matteo Ceriana
Antonio Canova (1757–1822), the greatest of all neoclassical sculptors, remains famous above all for the elegant nude mythological subjects that he carved exquisitely in marble. But he also worked in a deeply serious, deceptively simple style. This less familiar Canova is revealed in an extraordinary series of full-scale plaster models illustrating episodes from the Old and New Testaments. Such models, used to review his compositions before they were transferred into stone, were a distinctive feature of his sculptural practice. These Biblical scenes were made in connection with a project for 32 low reliefs that were to adorn the Tempio Canoviano, the church in his home town Possagno, which later became the artist’s mausoleum. He completed only seven models before his death. Six come from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, and one from the Gipsoteca in Possagno. Newly restored, they will all be lent for the first time to the United States. Drawing inspiration from ancient sculpture and early Renaissance masters, the models are striking for the marked linearity of the figures, arranged in brilliantly syncopated compositions. They constitute Canova’s last, profoundly moving masterworks.
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From the Gallerie d’Italia:
Canova. L’ultimo capolavoro. Le metope del Tempio
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014
a cura di Fernando Mazzocca e Matteo Ceriana
L’esposizione è organizzata da Intesa Sanpaolo in partnership con la Soprintendenza Speciale PSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Venezia e dei Comuni della Gronda lagunare e in collaborazione con la Fondazione Cariplo. Aperta al pubblico nella sede milanese fino al 6 gennaio 2014, la mostra sarà ospitata al Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York dal 20 gennaio al 27 aprile 2014.
Il recente restauro di sei bassorilievi in gesso conservati presso le Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, ispirati a episodi dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento, e lo studio dei documenti ad essi relativi hanno portato alla luce opere di grande valore storico. Sono infatti state identificate nelle opere restaurate i modelli originali per le prime delle trentadue metope – i pannelli decorativi destinati a ritmare il fregio dorico – che Antonio Canova, moderno Fidia, intendeva realizzare per il pronao del Tempio della natia Possagno, l’edificio maestoso da lui stesso progettato ispirandosi all’architettura del Partenone e del Pantheon.
Lo scultore iniziò a lavorare ai modelli delle metope nel dicembre del 1821; ai primi di aprile del 1822 ne erano stati eseguiti sette, subito inviati dallo studio di Roma all’Accademia di Venezia, perché altrettanti scultori, scelti tra i migliori allievi dell’Accademia stessa, iniziassero a realizzarne la versione in marmo. La morte, sopraggiunta il 13 ottobre 1822, impedì allo scultore di portare a compimento il progetto. Insieme ai sei bassorilievi del Tempio, sono in mostra sette disegni preparatori, provenienti dal Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa, in stretta relazione alle metope stesse, che testimoniano il costante interesse di Canova per i temi biblici e cristiani, così come il suo studio dei Primitivi.
Completano l’esposizione due esemplari, provenienti dalla Biblioteca Braidense, dell’Atlante illustrato della Storia della scultura (1813–1818 e 1822–1824) di Leopoldo Cicognara, storico dell’arte e amico di Canova: una fonte importante che permette di contestualizzare meglio il confronto con il Medioevo e il primo Rinascimento. Uno dei sette modelli delle metope, andato purtroppo perduto, viene rappresentato in mostra dal bassorilievo proveniente dalla Gipsoteca Antonio Canova di Possagno, appartenente ad una serie eseguita dai seguaci dell’opera del Maestro.
La mostra trova una sede ideale nelle sale della sezione Da Canova a Boccioni delle Gallerie di Piazza Scala, nelle quali sono esposti i bassorilievi Rezzonico di Collezione Fondazione Cariplo. Tale collocazione consente un confronto diretto – nell’ambito delle opere di Canova con la tecnica del bassorilievo in gesso – tra la produzione giovanile dell’ultimo decennio del Settecento, ispirata all’antichità classica, e opere realizzate prima della morte.
Lecture | Richard Cooper’s Album of Italian Drawings
From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Tom Edwards (Abbot & Holder, Ltd) | Amongst the Grand Tourists:
Richard Cooper Jnr’s (1740–1822) Album of Italian Drawings
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 6 December 2013
Research lunches are intended to be informal events in which individual doctoral students and scholars talk for half-an-hour about their projects, and engage in animated discussion with their peers. A sandwich lunch, will be provided by the Centre. We hope that this series will help foster a sense of community amongst PhD students and junior colleagues from a wide range of institutions, and bring researchers together in a collegial and friendly atmosphere.
In order to help us plan for these events, it is essential to check availability by emailing the Centre’s Events Co-ordinator, Ella Fleming (efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk) at least two days in advance.
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