Association of Art Historians Annual conference, Glasgow, April 15–17 2010.
We invite proposals of up to 250 words on the following area by 9 November 2009. Thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, some funding is available for speakers’ travel costs where institutional funding is not possible.
This session will examine the figure of the artist at work through a plurality of perspectives to probe issues of artistic labour in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The period threw up competing models through which to constitute the artist’s working environment: as workshop, studio, academy for teaching, and cultural space for the production of artist-patron relations. Artistic practice was contingent on changing techniques and technologies, methods and materials, yoked to theories of imitation and invention. This intersection between working tools such as mirrors and lenses and an early modern theorisation of art as mimesis, may be traced through preparatory works as the residue of practice. The changing deployment and rendering of the artist’s model bears witness to this history. Portraits of artists also embody these developments in their changing occlusion or display of the artist’s studio, models, and working tools. The session convenors would welcome papers in any of the following areas:
– Institutions: The Workshop, the Studio, the Academy
– Materials and Methods
– Techniques and Technologies: Tradition and Innovation
– Preparatory Methods: drawings, sketches, bozzetti, modelli
– The Artist’s Model
– Artists’ Portraits
– Imitation: Theories and Practices
– Invention: Art and Science.
Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh (Jill.Burke@ed.ac.uk)
Genevieve Warwick, University of Glasgow (G.Warwick@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk)