Medieval Art Research

CFP: Negotiation the Past. Islamic Heritage in Italy and Spain, Venice (1-2 February 2019), deadline 30 April 2018

The conference will focus on the discussion about the Islamic heritage in Italy and Spain and its later reception in the post-Islamic context. Sharing an Islamic past, both countries display this heritage in different ways through art and architecture. As cultural contact zones, Italy and Spain had a rich Islamic tradition, which has been adopted in the medieval Norman and Mudéjar artistic production.

These exchange processes are currently subject to ongoing international discussions. Furthermore, the observed medieval transfer mechanisms may be applied to the modern reception of the Italian and Spanish Islamic heritage. Which differences may be detected between the medieval edifices of Palermo or Seville and the neo-Islamic interiors in Sammezzano or Aranjuez? Has the reception behaviour of the 19th and 20th centuries changed compared to that of the Middle Age? How have the Islamic standards been assumed in the modern architectural vocabulary? Who were the possible promotors of this pro-Islamic art trend? What part did the medieval clients and their architects play? How relevant are the travellers, private collectors, arabists or art historians of the 19th century for the valorisation of the Islamic heritage? What was the role of Islamic heritage for the construction of identity and ideologies in both countries?

The current contributions shall be presented in four sections with the following thematic focus:

– Islamic heritage in Italy and Spain
– Cross-cultural exchange in the Middle Age
– Re-appropriating the Islamic past in 19th and 20th centuries art and architecture
– Ideologies and identity building

Papers will have a duration of 20 min. Conference languages will be English, Italian and Spanish. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a short CV, should be sent until 30 April 2018 to: conference@transculturalstudies.ch

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Guido Zucconi (IUAV) / Prof. Dr. Francine Giese (UZH) / Prof. Dr. Juan Calatrava (UGR) / Dr. Ariane Varela Braga (UZH)

Keynotes: Antonio Almagro Gorbea (Escuela de Estudios Árabes CSIC) / Ezio Godoli (UniFl)

Università Iuav di Venezia, 1-2 February 2019
Deadline: Apr 30, 2018

CFP: Moving Violence: Transgressing the Boundaries of Experience in Medieval Imagery, Tel Aviv University, (11-13 December 2018), deadline 18 June 2018

Violence imagery in medieval art reveals a parade of brutal acts: various stages of decapitation, splitting skulls, amputating limbs, enucleating eyes, yanking teeth, cutting off breasts, and other repugnant horrors. Often stripped of direct devotional context and thus presented as violence inflicted upon the imagined bodies of the depicted saints, these portrayals also attacked the body and mind of the viewers, accumulating into a physically and emotionally moving violence: the images incorporate time, space, and motion through movement in the staging of the scenes, which, in turn, stimulated both emotional and bodily reactions in the viewers. It also encouraged the audience to move with and around the images. Suggesting an imaginative somatic experience to the beholders, these images negotiate discourses on the nature of violence, bodily integrity, and the self, and transgress the boundaries between object and subject, representation and viewers, past and present, imagination and historicism.

This conference seeks to explore the complex of rhetoric and response forms to violence imagery, whether in devotional, liturgical, or secular contexts: namely, in the juridical, moral, and ethical discourses. It also seeks to explore how the changing definition of the term violence, whether in textual or visual sources, constitutes the watershed of a given culture, civilization, and their notion of individuality.

We invite papers on any medieval discipline or region that engages with issues of:

Call for Papers: Der Akt der Bildwerdung. Kreativität und Schöpfungskraft zwischen 1430 und 1530, Cologne 2-3/11/2018 (Deadline 29/04/2018)

an00146423_001_l Das Werkstattgespräch wird sich inhaltlich mit Produktions- und Rezeptionsmechanismen innerhalb von Bildmedien des 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts beschäftigen. Zentrales Thema ist der Prozess der Bildwerdung, also die Frage, wie die Idee und die inventio des Künstlers ins Bild übertragen werden und vor allem, wie sich dieser Übertragungsprozess im Bild nachvollziehen lässt. Dieser Frage wollen wir im Rahmen des Werkstattgesprächs nachgehen und dabei untersuchen, welchen besonderen Stellenwert die Künstler dem kreativen Schaffensprozess und dessen Sichtbarmachung einräumen.

Schon Plinius d. Ä. hatte im 35. Buch der Naturgeschichte postuliert, dass man die unvollendeten Werke der Künstler deshalb mehr bewundert würde, „weil man in ihnen die zurückgelassenen Skizzen [liniamenta] und selbst die Überlegungen [cogitations] der Künstler sieht und weil der Schmerz über die Hand, die während des Schaffens erstarrte, zu höherer Beachtung anreizt.“ Dies zeigt sich etwa in den Vorzeichnungen und Unterzeichnungen, die dem Künstler die Möglichkeit boten unbefangen zu arbeiten, zu experimentieren und das Konzept des Bildes zu verändern, da er nicht erwartete, dass diese Zeichnungen wieder sichtbar werden, nachdem verschiedene Schichten Farbe darüber aufgetragen wurden. Durch Infrarotreflektographien können wir die Intentionen und Gedanken der Werkgenese heute nachvollziehen und für Fragestellungen zum Verhältnis von materieller Form und Invention des Künstlers fruchtbar machen.
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Call for Papers: Mary of Guelders – Her Life and Prayer Book (ca. 1400) – Nijmegen, 23-24/11/2018 (Deadline 30/03/2018)

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Mary of Guelders’ richly illuminated prayer book, written by Helmich die Lewe and completed in 1415, is extraordinary for several reasons: it originally consisted of more than 600 folia, it is richly illuminated, it was written in the Lower Rhine vernacular, and it contains an unusual compilation of prayers, hours and components of a breviary. These past few years the book has been the focus of a research project spearheaded by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and Radboud University in Nijmegen. Their hard work has yielded enough noteworthy results to deserve its own exhibition which will open in Museum Het Valkhof on 13 October 2018 and will run until 6 January 2019. It will feature the research’s findings on the comprehensive and complex prayer book, the life of Mary, Duchess of Jülich and Guelders, and cultural developments in the duchies of Guelders, Jülich and Berg. To mark the occasion of the exhibition entitled ‘I, Mary of Guelders. The duchess and her extraordinary prayer book’ Radboud University is organising a two-day conference in Nijmegen together with Museum Het Valkhof and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

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New Publication: San Michele in Monte Laureto a Putignano. La grotta dell’Angelo e la cultura pittorica angioina nel meridione barese, by Marcello Mignozzi

A new book on the theme of Angevin Art in Southern Italy has just been published.
In San Michele in Monte Laureto a Putignano. La grotta dell’Angelo e la cultura pittorica angioina nel meridione barese, Marcello Mignozzi reconstructs the history of the rupestrian church of Saint Michael in Monte Laureto in Putignano (Apulia), Italy, investigating its historiographical, historical, and artistic aspects. The cross analysis of archival and artistic data allows the author to understand the value of an almost forgotten Medieval Sanctuary. The magnificent fourteenth-century fresco with the Crucifixion, made by two artists from Apulia influenced by Neapolitan art, is finally included in the pictorial context of the Angevin region. In this regard a lot of space is dedicated not only to examine the theme of the Crucifixion in the painting of the entire region, but also to frescoes, many of them unpublished, in Polignano, Mola di Bari, Monopoli, Noci, Conversano, Rutigliano, Capurso, Triggiano. Part of the work is then dedicated to the events of the rock church in the Modern Age, to the sculptures of Stefano da Putignano, and to the Contemporary Age. Finally, the study of road networks during the Middle Ages allows the reconstruction of the complex system of pilgrimages, but also of political and artistic relations between Putignano and the Angevin Principality of Taranto.

For more information on this publication, see https://www.ibs.it/san-michele-in-monte-laureto-libro-marcello-mignozzi/e/9788899224301

Call for Papers: ‘On Monumentality’, Acropolis Museum, Athens, 4-6 of April, 2019 (Deadline 15/06/2018)

on monumentality

A century separates us from the “rupture of history” and the historical ambiguities that the early heroic modernism introduced in the urban space, and eighty years from the destruction of the European monumental deposit from the bombings of WWII, a defining moment for the introduction of new kinds of monumentality alongside the old ones. Yet, monumentality still emerges as a major spatial, aesthetic, symbolic, architectural and archaeological phenomenon. In a climate of pessimism in present day western cities, which are dealing with an increasingly precarious present, due to economic and other forms of instability, the durability of monumentality as “urban permanence” (the famous Aldo Rossi concept), appears to be among the few remaining symbolic and spatial rocks and as such is needed, maintained, enhanced, landscaped and even invented.

The international conference “On Monumentality”, organised by the Module Art-Architecture-Urban Planning, Hellenic Open University, to be held in the Acropolis Museum, Athens, 4-6 of April, 2019, will explore the following relevant dimensions of monumentality and the monumental both in the European urban and peripheral space and also of cities/countries globally: Continue reading “Call for Papers: ‘On Monumentality’, Acropolis Museum, Athens, 4-6 of April, 2019 (Deadline 15/06/2018)”

Conference: Gothic Arts: An Interdisciplinary Symposium (Philadelphia, 23-24/03/2018)

Gothic Arts: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion
Van Pelt Library
University of Pennsylvania

March 23rd-24th, 2018

Organizers
Mary Caldwell, Department of Music
Sarah M. Guérin, Department of the History of Art
Ada Kuskowski, Department of History

In a passage from Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on good governance, a text written for the Cypriot king around 1267, the angelic doctor wrote: “Art is the imitation of nature. Works of art are successful to the extent that they achieve a likeness of nature.” This passage would seem to be the perfect explanation for the exceptionally life-like Adam sculpted for the south transept at the Parisian Notre-Dame, completed a handful of years earlier and possibly seen by Thomas before he left Paris for his Italian sojourn. However, by “ars” Aquinas meant not our “fine arts,” but technique and, even more broadly, human endeavor. The passage comes not from a discussion of the visual arts, but from a justification of benign kingship as opposed to democracy—the former being more akin to nature.

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Conference: Die Stuttgarter Apokalypse-Tafeln – Studientag an der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 20/04/2018)

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Eine Veranstaltung der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart und des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Stuttgart:

Zwei Hauptwerke unserer Sammlung waren in den letzten Monaten Gegenstand eines interdisziplinären Forschungsprojekts: die »Stuttgarter Apokalypse-Tafeln«, die um 1332/34 in Neapel geschaffen wurden. Detailreich und originell schildern sie die Visionen der Endzeit aus dem biblischen Buch der Offenbarung.

Erstmals haben nun Kunsthistoriker, Restauratoren und Naturwissenschaftler gemeinsam zu den Tafeln geforscht. Ihre Ergebnisse präsentieren sie in dem Band »Die Stuttgarter Apokalypse-Tafeln«, der im März 2018 erscheint (80 Seiten, 69 farbige Abbildungen, Sandstein Verlag, Dresden, 19,90 € im Museumsshop). Mit großformatigen Farbtafeln und Detailaufnahmen zeigt das Buch, wie der Künstler zu seinen Bilderfindungen gelangte und durch seine raffinierte Maltechnik, verbunden mit kostbaren Materialien, die Wirkung der Gemälde steigerte. Neue Erkenntnisse zu Auftraggeber und Funktion verorten die Tafeln in der Hofkultur des Königs Robert von Anjou in Neapel.

Studientag

Am 20.4.2018, 10.00–17.00 Uhr, veranstalten die Staatsgalerie und das Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Stuttgart einen internationalen Studientag mit Beiträgen renommierter Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus dem In- und Ausland.

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New Publication: Manuscripts in the Making Art and Science, vol. 1, edited by Stella Panayotova and Paola Ricciardi

ISBN 978-1-909400-10-8

More Info: http://bit.ly/2ywI3Si

This ground-breaking publication presents the papers delivered at the international Conference held in Cambridge in December 2016 to mark the end of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s acclaimed bicentenary exhibition “Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts”. It is the first of two volumes in which medievalists and scientists share the results of their research, and combine here to elucidate both the materials and techniques of production of illuminated manuscripts, as well as the artists’ collaboration and their aesthetic objectives. Of the 34 papers given at the proceedings, 17 are included in the present volume covering scientific analyses of West European, Byzantine and Islamic manuscripts, Colour and Pigment Studies, Painting Techniques and Workshop Practices, as well as details of the latest scientific techniques and instruments employed for these non-invasive and non-destructive investigations into the delicate manuscripts. The texts are accompanied by over 200 illustrations as well as explanatory tables and diagrams.

Table of Contents

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New Journal: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Winter 18 issue

Historians of Netherlandish Art announces the publication of the Winter 2018 issue (vol. 10:1) of the refereed, open-access Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (jhna.org).Continue reading “New Journal: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Winter 18 issue”