(Updated) Conference Programme:
Fifty Years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture.
New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material
Saturday 21 June 2014, 10.00 – 18.00 (with registration from 09.30)
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
‘Tomb Sculpture will remain….among the basic works which determine turning points in the history of our discipline’. (Review in Art Bulletin, 1967).
The Courtauld Institute will be holding a one-day conference in 2014 to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, comprising the lectures delivered originally in the fall of 1956 at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Panofsky’s lectures represented a new attempt to consider funerary monuments as artistic objects, charting developments in their iconography, style, form and function within the broader chronology of art history. Panofsky also emphasised the importance of tombs as evidence for changing (and sometimes contradictory) attitudes towards the deceased.
Examining monuments across Europe, from the Medieval to Early Modern periods, this conference will explore the legacy of Panofsky’s work as well as showcase the developments in research techniques and approaches that have led to new insights into tomb sculpture.
Ticket/Entry Details: £16 (£11 students, Courtauld staff/students, concessions). Please note that online booking for this event has now closed. However, limited places will be available on the day on a first come, first served basis (cash payment only).
For further information: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/calendar.shtml
Organised by Professor Susie Nash, Ann Adams and Jessica Barker (The Courtauld Institute of Art).
PROGRAMME
09.30 – 10.00 Registration
10.00 – 10.40 Professor Susie Nash (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
Welcome and Introduction: Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture. Four lectures on its changing aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (1964).
10.40 – 11.00 Break for refreshments (provided – Seminar Room 1)
SESSION 1: Reassessing Panofsky (Chair: Ann Adams)
11.00 – 11.25 Shirin Fozi (University of Pittsburgh): ‘From the ‘pictorial’ to the ‘statuesque’: Rudolf of Swabia, Widukind of Saxony, and the Problem of Plastic Form
11.25 – 11.50 Geoff Nuttall (Independent Scholar): ‘Delicate to the point of evanescence’: Panofsky, Ilaria del Carretto and Jacopo della Quercia
11.50 – 12.15 Jessica Barker (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Prospective and Retrospective: Joint Memorials in the Middle Ages
12.15 – 12.30 Panel questions
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch (not provided)
SESSION 2: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material (Chair: Michaela Zöschg)
13.30 – 13.55 Luca Palozzi (Edinburgh College of Art): ‘To Carve a Living Person out of Stone’: Petrarch, Pandolfo Malatesta, and the Origins of the Renaissance Humanist Tomb in Fourteenth-Century Italy
13.55 – 14.20 Christina Welch (University of Winchester): Cadaver monuments in England
14.20 – 14.45 James Cameron (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Competing for ‘dextro cornu magnum altaris’: Tombs and Liturgical Seating in English Churches
14.45 – 15.00 Panel questions
15.00 – 15.30 Break for refreshments (provided – Seminar Room 1)
SESSION 3: Reconstruction, Materials and Conservation (Chair: Kim Woods)
15.30 – 15.45 Kim Woods (The Open University): Introduction on materials
15.45 – 16.10 Martha Dunkelman (Canisius College): Deconstructing Donatello’s Brancacci Chapel
16.10 – 16.35 Marisa Costa (University of Lisbon): Does technical investigation fully answer art history questions? The case study of a Portuguese copper tomb from the early fifteenth century.
16.35 – 16.50 Panel questions
16.50 – 17.00 Summary: Ann Adams & Jessica Barker
17.00 – 18.00 Dr Phillip Lindley (University of Leicester)
Keynote: Taking leave of Panofsky
18.00 RECEPTION (Front Hall)
Recent art-historical research has brought us new understandings of the central symbol of Christianity, the Cross, in different places, at different times, in different media, and with different theoretical and conceptual foci. The Cross, its representations and significations, and the appearance and materiality of those representations, features in many areas of current research, but not often as a central subject to be dealt with thematically and comparatively. This session invites considerations of images depicting, representing or referring to the Cross in any media, and across the middle ages, from early to late. The aim of the session is to consider what can be gained at this particular moment in scholarship from a common concentration on the theme of the Cross. Therefore, proposers are invited especially to consider their subject matter in light of theoretical perspectives that have been prominent in recent art-historical scholarship, such as (but not limited to) affect, emotion, movement, medium and materiality.
Medieval Art Research 