CFP. Revisiting Raphael’s Vatican Stanze: Papal Power and Artistic Agency in Sixteenth-Century Rome
Session(s) for the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC), 26-29 October, 2017, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Panel organizers: Kim Butler Wingfield, American University, Washington, DC, and Tracy Cosgriff, Hamilton College
The upcoming quincentennial of Raphael’s death is an auspicious opportunity to reappraise the painter’s famous frescoes in the suite of papal apartments today known as the Vatican Stanze.We invite papers that offer new interpretations of these canonical works, painted by the artist and his workshop between 1508 and 1524: the Stanza della Segnatura, the Stanza di Eliodoro, the Stanza dell’Incendio, and the Sala di Costantino.
These might address questions of: translation and mediation (iconographies, ideologies, semiotics of text-image relationships); collaboration and agency (between and of the master, his workshop, patrons, and humanist advisors); space (real and imagined ritual function, experience of spectatorship); process(technique, style, materials); transitions and boundaries (between rooms, papal patrons, before and after Raphael’s death, secular and sacred, Medieval subject matter and Renaissance form, and represented temporalities); and the status of images (in the context of art theory, humanism, as well as Catholic and Protestant Reform debates).
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short CV to Kim Butler Wingfield and Tracy Cosgriff by 13 April.