Academic Sessions: Edinburgh 2000
Depicted Bodies and Present Souls?
Convenors:
Dr Rupert Shepherd, 80A Fentiman Road, London, SW8 1LA. Tel/Fax: 020 7820 0200; rupert@ferarra.u-net.com
Dr Robert Maniura, 44 Wolseley Ave, Wimbledon Park, London, SW18 8BO; robert.maniura@courtauld.ac.uk
We seek to reconsider the notion of 'presence' in images, by which we mean the identity of the image with the thing it depicts, the 'inherence' of the depicted thing in the image, the conflation of the two or the elision of the gap between them. Papers cover the fullest possible chronological and subject range, including non-western art. Contributors address these issues from various directions, for example literary sources, the uses and abuses of images, or the responses invited by the images themselves.
Hellmut Wohl (Boston University): Image and Prototype: iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm in 8th and 9th century Byzantium
Robert Maniura (Courtauld Institute of Art): Seeing the Body of Christ: Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition and the Eucharist.
Rupert Shepherd (Independent): Living pictures in Renaissance Ferrara.
Bridget Heal (Courtauld Institute of Art): Images of the Virgin Mary in Post-Reformation Germany
Alexander Nagel (University of Toronto): Real Presence as Antidote: early modern reassessments of the power of images
Kate Bomford (Courtauld Institute of Art): Voice, Breath and Spirit in Rubens' Portraits of Humanists
John Nash (University of Essex): The Representation of 'Soul' by Rembrandt
Gert Fischer (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität München): Presence of Divinity: Poussin's Conception of Figures and the Depiction of Mythical Nature
Erika Naginski (Harvard University): The Object of Contempt: picturing collective redress in the 1790s
Michael Leja (Massachussets Institute of Technology): Realism and the Deceived Viewer
James Hall: Desire and Disgust: touching artworks from 1500 to 1800
Andrew Harrison (University of Bristol): A General Theoretical Account of Presence