Contents

Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010

AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow

The Artist at Work in Early Modern Italy (c. 1450-1700): Methods, Materials, Models, Mimesis

Session Convenors:

Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh Jill.Burke@ed.ac.uk
Genevieve Warwick, University of Glasgow, G.Warwick@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

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 addresses the following themes:

• 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.

Speakers:

Tracy Cooper (Temple University)
Intersecting the Artist’s Studio in Early Modern Venice

Bjorn Skaarup (European University Institute)
Science for the Artist: Artistic Anatomy and Mathematics in the Renaissance Academies of Art, 1563-1609

Francesca Marini (Palazzo Rucellai Institute, Florence)
Artists’ modus operandi as connoisseurs: The Florentine case between the end of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

J Joris Von Gastel (Leiden University)
Bernini at Work: Franchezza, Connoisseurship, and the Sculptor’s touch

Alessandra Buccheri (Oxford University)
Artists at work between art and theatre: cloud representations and cloud machinery

Joanna Norman (Victoria & Albert Museum)
Technology in Theory and Practice in Baroque Theatre Design

Fabiana Cazzola (University of Basel)
Aspects of Temporality in Self-Portraits of the Cinquecento

Ben Thomas (University of Kent)
Etching and Originality in Early Modern Italy

Gabriele Sprigath (University of Munich)
The Parallel between Painter and Poet in the First Chapter of Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte (c. 1400)

Gerardo de Simone (Pisa University)
Fra Angelico in Florence and Rome: Organisation and Peculiarities of a Dominican Friar’s ‘Workshop’

Richard Talbot (University of Newcastle)
Perspective and Spatial Play

Craig Staff (University of Northampton) and Paul Cureton (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Central Orbits and Corporeal Realities: Drawing and the Renaissance Workshop

Damian Dombrowski (University of Wuerzburg)
The Painter Without Hands: Botticelli's Self-Portrait in the Del Lama Adoration

Anne Bloemacher (University of Muenster)
Raphael at Work in Marcantonio Raimondi's Engraving