Call for Papers: ‘Alabaster as a Material for Medieval & Renaissance sculpture’, 8th Annual Ards Conference, Deadline 15 December 2020

The 8th ARDS annual colloquium, which celebrates new research in the field of renaissance and medieval sculpture will focus on alabaster as a material for European sculpture from the 14th until the 17th century.

Much research has been carried out on this subject over the past few decades in several European countries, both in universities and in laboratories, and in particular on the occasion of restorations carried out in museums and historic monuments. New analysis methods have improved our knowledge of the origin of alabaster and the quarries exploited during this period, supply and trade circuits – often long distance – have been brought to light, restorations have enabled to specify the implementation of the material. The results have been the subject of seminars, study days and major publications.

In order to present the general public with a summary of the current state of our knowledge, M Leuven and the Musée du Louvre have decided to jointly organize an international exhibition on this theme in 2022, showing how and why alabaster was used for sculpture in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque period. This exhibition will bring together high-quality sculptures, small-format objects with monumental achievements, from the Louvre and M’s collections, as well as from numerous public and private collections. About a year before the exhibition, the Paris colloquium aims to bring together specialists in this material, whether they are geologists, restorers, historians or art historians. The scientific committee of the conference invites researchers to submit papers on:

  • Identifying the provenance of alabaster, quarries, quarrying and trade in alabaster
  • Recent restorations implementing new analysis methods and providing information on the use of alabaster (cutting and polishing, polychromy and surface treatments, framing, association with other materials, etc.)
  • Significant achievements in alabaster
  • The meaning of alabaster from the 14th to the 17th century

The conference committee consists of Sophie Jugie (Musée du Louvre), Peter Carpreau (M Leuven/Ards), Marjan Debaene (M Leuven/Ards), Pierre Yves le Pogam (Musée du Louvre)

Would you like to submit a paper for this conference?

Your proposal can be of an art-historical, historical as well as historiographical, technical or scientific in nature. Multidisciplinarity is encouraged. Case studies as well as papers providing a broader view and/or of a more reflective nature are welcomed. Priority will be given to speakers presenting new research findings and contributions relevant to the specific conference theme. Submissions that are not selected for presentation in plenum, can still be taken into consideration for a (digital) poster presentation. The organisation will publish acta colloquia in postprint after the conference.

How to submit your proposal?

  • Write an abstract in English in word or pdf; max. 500 words (excl. authors name(s) and contact details).
  • Include a short CV.
  • E-mail to Marjan Debaene via info(a)ards.be

Practical info

  • Call for papers Deadline: 15.12.20
  • Successful applicants will receive a notification by 31.01.21
  • The languages used during these days are French and English.
  • The lectures, illustrated by PowerPoint presentation, will last 20 minutes.
  • Discussion moments will be provided at the end of each session of 3 or 4 presentations.
  • Transport and / or accommodation costs are the responsibility of the selected communicators.

Organising committee : Sophie Jugie (Paris, Louvre Museum, Sculptures Department), Isabelle Haquet (Louvre Museum, Auditorium), Peter Carpreau (M Leuven / ARDS), Marjan Debaene (M Leuven / ARDS), Anne Liefsoens (M Leuven / ARDS)

Scientific committee: Peter Carpreau (M Leuven / ARDS), Marjan Debaene (M Leuven / ARDS), Sophie Jugie (Paris, Louvre Museum), Pierre-Yves Le Pogam (Paris, Louvre Museum), Lise Leroux (Paris, Historical Monuments Research Laboratory), Aleksandra Lipinska (Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians- University, Wolfram Klopmann (Orleans, Bureau of Geological and Mining Research), Carmen Morte Garcia (Zaragoza, University of Zaragoza), Kim Woods (London, Open University UK).

Questions or more information? Please contact Marjan Debaene via info@ards.be

Disclaimer: Should there arise problems or new restrictions regarding travel to Paris due to a possible new wave of COVID-19, the conference will be held online via webinar presentations (and if so unfortunately without the in situ visits).
Therefore the final program will only be compiled and communicated in the spring of 2021.

CFP: The (After)Lives of Objects: Transposition in the Material World, deadline 15 December 2020

The (After)Lives of Objects: Transposition in the Material World, University of Virginia Art & Architectural History Graduate Online Symposium, March 18–19, 2021

Transposition involves the movement of people, objects, and ideas from one context to another. The reverberating impacts of such regional and transregional exchanges have shaped artistic expressions, systems of knowledge, and relationships among polities. Recently, scholarship has turned to the object as a material manifestation of cross-cultural, transregional, and imperial encounters. [After]Lives is an interdisciplinary symposium that explores how transposition has materialized throughout history. How are objects changed when they are activated as mediums of encounter? In what ways do makers and users negotiate their positionality between and within societies through objects? How have artists and other creators problematized binary ideas of encounter and exchange in their works? When should adaptations be considered cultural appropriation instead of cross-cultural connectors? Can they be both? What is at stake when materials, artistic techniques, and/or technologies originating from one region are duplicated outside of that region?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Mediation of transcultural encounters through visual and material objects
  • Processes of adaptation and assimilation in visual and material culture
  • History of looting, collecting, and the art market
  • Role of institutions in the (re)contextualization of objects
  • Studies that problematize notions of influence, exchange, and reception across social, cultural, and artistic hierarchies
  • Imperial and colonial networks of collection, trade, and exchange

We welcome submissions from graduate students at all stages and areas of study. 

  • Papers should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a Q&A plenary session.
  • Papers must be original and previously unpublished. Graduate students are invited to submit a CV and an abstract (250 words) in a single PDF file by December 15, 2020 to the symposium committee at uvaartandarch@gmail.com.
  • Applicants will be notified of decisions by January 15, 2021. Limited funds will be available to cover expenses associated with presenting at the symposium.

Keynote Speaker: Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Architecture, MIT | Author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014) and Objects of Encounter: China in Eighteenth-Century France (forthcoming)

New Publication: The Monuments Man: Essays in Honour of Jerome Bertram, ed. Christian Steer

This Festschrift honours the late Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory and former Vice-President of the Monumental Brass Society, who admired, researched, lectured and wrote about monumental brasses and incised slabs for over fifty years. The essays in this volume represent the latest research from scholars who shed new light on all types of monument – cross-slabs, effigies, incised slabs and brasses, canopied tombs – as individual case studies and regional studies.

They also consider the production process, workshops, antiquarian studies and the evidence for lost monuments not only in England and Wales but across mainland Europe. They range chronologically from as early as Christ’s tomb in ancient Jerusalem through the Roman, medieval and early modern periods and conclude with a study of a brass in nineteenth-century Oxford. These essays are a worthy tribute to an antiquary who did so much to promote the study of medieval funerary monuments. The contents are:

  • Martin Stuchfield Foreword
  • Christian Steer Introduction: Jerome Bertram and the Study of Monuments
    Julian Luxford The Greatest Tomb of All
  • Martin Henig Dining in Paradise: The Totenmahl in Roman Britain
  • Aleksandra McClain Symbols on Medieval Cross-Slabs: What have we learned?
  • Brian and Moira Gittos Middleton on-the-Wolds: The Anatomy and Genesis of a Thirteenth Century Effigy
  • Madeleine Gray ‘Jesu mercy, Lady help’: Medieval Tomb Carvings at Tintern Abbey
  • Sally Badham The Iconography and Meaning of Semi-Effigial and Related Monuments in Lincolnshire c. 1275–c. 1400
  • Nigel Saul Why are there so few Pre-Reformation Monuments in Cornwall?
  • Robert Hutchinson Piety in Peril: Sixteenth Century ‘Chichester School’ Monuments and a Case Study in Iconoclasm
  • Philip J. Lankester and John Blair The Medieval Purbeck Marble Industry at Corfe and London
  • Jon Bayliss New Thoughts on A Sixteenth-Century Workshop
    Paul Cockerham Contrasting Commemorative Patterns in Late-Medieval Lübeck
  • Sophie Oosterwijk “All that glitters is not gold …”. New Evidence on Precious-Metal Effigial Tombs in Medieval Europe
  • Ann Adams Place and Space: The Epitaphs of Jean de Melun and Philippe Pot, Fifteenth-Century Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece
  • Reinhard Lamp Enigmatic Anna: On the Slab of Anna von Mecklenburg in Doberan Minster
  • David Lepine Mount Carmel on the Marches: The Commemoration of Carmelite Bishop, John Stanbury, at Hereford Cathedral
  • John S. Lee Commemoration in Context: The Stapleton, Hathelsay and Fitzwilliam Chantries at St John the Baptist’s Haddlesey, Yorkshire
  • Jean Wilson Sit! The Brydges Monument at Ludgershall, Wiltshire
  • Adam White Richard Hayward and the Henley Family
  • Robin Emmerson Lost Monuments? A Couple of Wedgwood Near Misses
  • David Meara The Brass to John Billingsley Seymour (d. 1843), Balliol College, Oxford
  • Christian Steer ‘A tombe to be made over my grave’: The Parishioners of St Nicholas Shambles, London, and their Monuments, c. 1350–c. 1550
  • Nicholas Rogers Why St Jerome? A Note on the Iconography of the Great Berkhamsted Palimpsest
  • Richard Busby Alexander Nesbitt (1817–86): A Pioneer in the Study of Continental Brasses and Incised Slabs
  • Charlotte A. Stanford By Land or Sea: The Fifteenth-Century English Pilgrim’s Choice of Route to Santiago de Compostela

The retail price is £49.50 plus P&P but a special offer is available of £40 (post-free in the U.K., check with pub- lisher the price for overseas). To order a copy please send a cheque for £40 made payable to Shaun Tyas and this order form to Shaun Tyas Publishing, 1 High Street, Donington, Lincolnshire, PE11 4TA (e): shaun@shauntyas.myzen.co.uk and (t): 01775 821542.

To get a discounted copy of the book, see the flyer here:Download the flyer

CFP: ‘Power, Patronage & Production: Book Arts from Central Europe (ca. 800–1500) in American Collections’, (Princeton/New York, 13-15 Jan 2022), Deadline 1 February 2021

On January 13–15, 2022, the Index of Medieval Art (Princeton University), the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum (New York), and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University will host a conference to accompany the exhibition, “Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, 800–1500,” presented at the Morgan Library from October 15, 2021 to January 23, 2022. The conference will include two days of papers as well as a study day at the Morgan Library. For each paper, 30 minutes of speaking time, followed by 15 minutes of discussion, will be allotted. In addition to a viewing of the exhibition, the study day will include an opportunity to view other, unexhibited materials in the Morgan’s collections.

Despite its scope, the exhibition cannot comprehend all the relevant material in American collections. Nor can the accompanying book treat all the exhibited items in depth. With this in mind, we solicit proposals for papers. Pending the usual peer-review process, the contributions will be published.

Paper proposals, no more than one page in length, should fall into one of the following categories or address one of the following topics:

– in-depth monographic discussion of a single manuscript in an American collection, whether or not it is included in the exhibition. Please contact Joshua O’Driscoll (jodriscoll@themorgan.org) for a list of objects that will be discussed in the book accompanying the exhibition (many but not all of which will be exhibited) and a list of all relevant materials in the Morgan Library’s collections. More information on many of these manuscripts, also those in other American collections, can be found at Digital Scriptorium: https://digital-scriptorium.org/.

– thematic treatment of one of a number of broader issues relevant to the exhibition’s concerns; these include but are by no means limited to the following:

  • Art & the politics of empire
  • Art & reform/Reformation
  • Borders of empire
  • Cosmopolitan contacts and exchanges
  • Geographic foci (e.g., Helmarshausen, Prague, Salzburg, Weingarten)
  • Humanism in Central Europe
  • Imperial patronage
  • Monastic networks
  • Manuscript illumination and the other arts
  • Paper, parchment & pen-drawing/production techniques
  • Patrician patronage in imperial cities
  • Panel painting
  • Psalters
  • Reception/collecting of German medieval art in the United States
  • Urbanism & the art of the book
  • Visualization & the vernacular

Proposals should be submitted to Prof. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Harvard University (jhamburg@fas.harvard.edu) by February 1, 2021. A response indicating whether or not any given proposal has been accepted will be forthcoming by April 1, 2021. Finalized abstracts, which will be circulated to all participants, would then be due by August 1, 2021. The organizers will do their best to accommodate all relevant proposals within the confines of the program, the scope and format of which will be determined by the funding available and the current public health situation. In the event that an in-person meeting is feasible, speakers’ costs for travel and accommodation in Princeton and New York will be covered. Colleagues submitting proposals are asked to indicate their interest in presenting a paper by video call, should travel not be possible.

Job: Director of the Excavations of the Athenian Agora, deadline 31 January 2021

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens seeks an active scholar and experienced field archaeologist to direct its excavations of the Athenian Agora. Familiarity with the School’s program of excavation and research at the Agora is highly desirable. The Director administers the School’s plant and facilities at the Agora. The Director works with the excavation staff in developing and conducting fieldwork and documenting results. The Director supervises the management of collections and the publication of all finds. The Director identifies projects for funding and helps to identify possible sources of funds for the excavations. The Director participates in the School’s activities, including its academic program and the instruction of students through the summer volunteer program. Candidates must demonstrate strong qualities of leadership and articulate clearly their vision for the future of the Athenian Agora excavations. Command of Modern Greek is essential.

The term of residency in Athens is flexible in order to accommodate applicants who teach on semester and quarter terms or have other university teaching requirements. The initial appointment is for three to five years, with five years being the preferred norm. It begins on July 1, 2022, and is renewable. Salary and benefits commensurate with rank and experience; certain travel costs are provided.

The Director of the Excavations of the Athenian Agora reports to the Director of the School and through the Director to the Managing Committee. The current Director of the Agora Excavations is not seeking a new term.

The deadline for applications and all supporting materials is January 31, 2021.

Candidates apply online, uploading a cover letter or statement explaining their interest in the position and their vision for it (max. 750 words) and curriculum vitae, at:
ascsa.submittable.com/submit/178254/director-of-the-agora-excavations-application-form.

Candidates should ask three people familiar with their work to send a letter of support as a PDF to application@ascsa.org.

ASCSA is an EO/AA employer.

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, sex, sexual orientation, color, religion, ethnic origin, or disability when considering admission to any form of membership or application for employment.

Online Lecture: ‘Wild (Wo)men, Commodified Forests: Matter & Myth in German Sculpture’ with Dr Ruth Ezra, 2 December 2020, 18:00-18:40 (GMT)

Join this virtual discussion of Paloma Varga Weisz: Bumped Body, an exhibition of contemporary sculpture now on view at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. (Galleries currently closed.)

Dr. Ruth Ezra will be speaking on the matter, myth, and morphology of Varga Weisz’s sculpture and fielding questions from the public at a Q&A on Wednesday, December 2 at 6 p.m. GMT / 1 p.m. EST / 10 a.m. PST. Her pre-recorded remarks will also be available to watch on the website from November 25.

The event is free and open to all; please register online.

Early in her career, the contemporary sculptor Paloma Varga Weisz spent three years training as a limewood carver in Bavaria. Learning this traditional craft opened up new possibilities in her sculptural practice. It also connected her to the celebrated history of limewood carving in southern German art.

This talk begins by looking back half a millennium at limewood sculpture produced north of the Alps, c.1500. As we journey into the forested hinterlands of Franconia in search of trunks to carve, we will encounter other traditional materials that feature in Weisz’s art, such as clay.

But the forests of southern Germany provided sculptors with more than just matter. They were the stuff of myth: in their shadows lurked hairy wild men. It is against this background of a natural world at once commodified and mythologised that we will consider the formation and deformation of sculpted bodies such as Weisz’s Woman of the Forest (2001), Wild Bunch (1998), Bumpman (2002), and Deer, Standing (1993), among others.

Dr Ruth Ezra is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Southern California. She has received research grants from The British Museum, Villa I Tatti, Gerda Henkel Stiftung and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, among others. In 2017, she held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute.

Find out ‘Moore’ here (sorry, I had to include the pun…).

New Publication: ‘The Rood in Medieval Britain & Ireland, c.800-c.1500’, Edited by Philippa Turner & Jane Hawkes

New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual, material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and complexity.

The rood was central to medieval Christianity and its visual culture: Christ’s death on the cross was understood as the means by which humankind was able to gain salvation, and depictions of the cross, and Christ’s death upon it, were ubiquitous.

This volume brings together contributions offering a new perspective on the medieval rood – understood in its widest sense, as any kind of cross – within the context of Britain and Ireland, over a wide period of time which saw significant political and cultural change. In doing so, it crosses geographical, chronological, material, and functional boundaries which have traditionally characterised many previous discussions of the medieval rood. Acknowledging and exploring the capacity of the rood to be both universal and specific to particular locations and audiences, these contributions also tease out the ways in which roods related to one another, as well as how they related to their physical and cultural surroundings, often functioning in dialogue with other images and the wider devotional topography – both material and mental – in which they were set.

The chapters consider roods in a variety of media and contexts: the monumental stone crosses of early medieval England, twelfth-century Ireland, and, spreading further afield, late medieval Galicia; the three-dimensional monumental wooden roods in English monasteries, Irish friaries, and East Anglian parish churches; roods that fit in the palm of a hand, encased in precious metals, those that were painted on walls, drawn on the pages of manuscripts, and those that appeared in visions, dreams, and gesture.

Editors:

PHILIPPA TURNER gained her PhD in History of Art at the University of York; JANE HAWKES is Professor of Art History at the University of York.

Contributors: Sarah Cassell, Sara Carreño, Jane Hawkes, Malgorzata Krasnodebska-D’Aughton, John Munns, Kate Thomas, Philippa Turner, Maggie Williams, Lucy J. Wrapson.

Table of Contents:

  • Introduction: Rethinking the Rood – Philippa Turner
  • Approaching the Cross: The Sculpted High Crosses of Anglo-Saxon England – Jane Hawkes
  • The Mark of Christ in Wood, Grass and Field: Open-Air Roods in Old English Medical Remedies – Kate Thomas
  • Twelfth-Century English Rood Visions: Some Iconographic Notes – John Munns
  • Crosses, Croziers, and the Crucifixion: Twelfth-Century Crosses in Ireland – Maggie Williams
  • From Religious Artefacts to Symbols of Identity: The Role of Stone Crosses in Galician National Discourse – Sara Carreño
  • The Rood in the Late Medieval English Cathedral: The Black Rood of Scotland Reassessed – Philippa Turner
  • The Cross of Death and the Tree of Life: Franciscan Ideologies in Late Medieval Ireland – Malgorzata Krasnodebska-D’Aughton
  • Heralding the Rood: Colour Convention and Material Hierarchies on Late Medieval English – Lucy Wrapson
  • Reframing the Rood: Fifteenth-Century Angel Roofs and the Rood in East Anglia – Sarah Cassell

Order your copy here.

  • November 2020
  • 14 colour, 48 black and white illustrations
  • 247 pages
  • 24×17 cm

Online Workshop: ‘Meet the Manuscripts: The Psalms in the Middle Ages’ with the Bodleian Library, 3 December 2020, 5.30–6.15pm (GMT)

Registration closes on 1 December – book your tickets now.

This workshop showcases medieval manuscripts of the Book of Psalms.

Join Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, and Lesley Smith, Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, to learn how manuscripts can help us understand the central place of the Psalms in medieval culture.

Find out more here.

Call for Papers: Cistercian Worlds, Centre for for Medieval Studies, University of York (July 1-2 2021), deadline 31 January 2021

Scholars have explained the success of the Cistercians materially through the perspectives of archaeology, architecture and art, and historians, theologians and literary scholars have analysed the achievements of Cistercian thought and spiritual practices. More recently, investigations have broadened the range of sources used (e.g. works of medicine and natural science, exempla collections), in addition to analysing this evidence using novel, paradigm-shifting approaches (history of emotions, neuroscience, queer theory).

‘CISTERCIAN WORLDS’, a two-day conference scheduled for early July 2021, aims to offer a forum for researchers to build upon existing modes of scholarship and bring together discussions currently occurring across disciplines. How did an initial shared world-view create many different Cistercian ‘worlds’? What were the boundaries – real or imagined – of these spheres? Who composed them? In which ways did they extend, shrink, overlap and evolve? What approaches can be used to study them?

As such, we are seeking proposals for papers that distil the latest interdisciplinary research on the medieval Cistercians (writ large) and place the study of the Order into conversation with currents and themes outside the cloister walls. Graduate students and early-career researchers are particularly encouraged to apply. Papers should look to showcase the evolving nature of Cistercian scholarship and the new directions that are now being taken.

The organisers are looking to publish the conference proceedings as a special edition. While this is not a guarantee of publication, successful participants should be aware that their research, pending the usual process of peer review, may be accepted.

The organisers are excited to announce our two keynote speakers: Professors Emilia Jamroziak and Constance Mews. The conference will also conclude with a roundtable discussion, with participants including Professors Emilia Jamroziak, Janet Burton, and Martha Newman.

How to Apply

Please send an abstract (no longer than 250 words) to Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow (erpg500@york.ac.uk) with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) and career stage. Deadline 31st January 2021.

Workshop: Virtual/Material: Color/Pigment, Penn State University (9–13 August 2021), Deadline 14 December 2020

The Department of Art History at Penn State University is seeking applications from doctoral students in art history and related disciplines for the week-long workshop, Virtual/Material: Color/Pigment.

Funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, this workshop will offer an integrated curriculum of Technical and Digital Art History via the special case history of color. Through a combination of seminars, demonstrations, and hands-on labs led by a distinguished faculty of scientists and historians, participants can expect to leave the workshop better equipped to understand historical colorants and their production as well as the ways in which digital cultures can distort or ameliorate historians’ approach to such colorants.

The current requirement that art historians rely more or less exclusively on virtual platforms and digital resources for their research and teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has made plainer the need for scholars to understand the relationship between works of art as material objects and as data. The evidentiary status of digital representations of works of art is a question that has become as pressing for students and scholars of art history as it has long been for conservators and conservation scientists, imaging professionals, data scientists, and information specialists. Processes of translation from the material into data and vice-versa are poorly understood by most art historians, potentially jeopardizing the validity of research questions and findings. This predicament is especially conspicuous in the realm of color —a property of artworks that is often misunderstood or marginalized.

Led by Sarah K. Rich, the workshop’s distinguished faculty includes Susan Farnand (Rochester Institute of Technology), Carolyn L. Kane (Ryerson University), Hannelore Roemich (Institute of Fine Arts), Michael Hickner (Penn State), John Russell (Penn State), Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University), and Tracy Stuber (Getty Research Institute).

The workshop will take place August 9 – 13, 2021.

Plans are to conduct the workshop in person; however, should conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitate the shift to a virtual format, all sessions will be live-streamed and necessary instructional materials will be shipped in advance to participants. The decision about whether the workshop will be held in-person at Penn State or conducted virtually via Zoom or another digital platform will be made at the time applicants are notified of admission.

DEADLINE and SUBMISSION
Applications for Virtual/Material : Color/Pigment are due via email to color@psu.edu by 11:59
pm EST on Monday, December 14, 2020. Award notifications will be sent in late February.

ELIGIBILITY
• Applicants should be PhD students in art history or a related discipline (e.g. archaeology,
architectural history, visual studies).
• International students and students pursuing their PhD at institutions outside the U.S.
are eligible and encouraged to apply.

Interested students who do not anticipate being able to travel to Penn State to
participate are encouraged to apply given the possibility that the workshop will be
conducted virtually.

EXPENSES INCLUDED
Roundtrip travel, shared lodging, shared meals, books, and all lab materials.

APPLICATION MATERIALS

  1. Letter of Interest (2-3 pages), which should include an explanation of the value of this
    workshop for your current research
  2. Dissertation prospectus or other relevant writing sample (20 pages maximum)
  3. CV
  4. One recommendation letter

Find out more here.