The 2020 RSA was cancelled. What’s listed below are the sponsored panels that were accepted. At present, we are hoping to resubmit them for the 2021 annual meeting in Dublin.
IAS Sessions accepted at RSA in Philadelphia, PA (originally scheduled for 2-4 April 2020) [https://www.rsa.org/page/2020Philadelphia]
New Perspectives on Italian Art
Session Organizers: Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, University of Vermont; Ilaria Andreoli, Research fellow, ITEM-CNRS, Paris
These sessions create a space for emerging scholars (recent Ph.D.s or Ph.D. candidates) to present their work on any area of early modern Italian art (1300-1600). These scholars work with new methodologies, new areas of study, or innovative approaches to more traditional areas of Renaissance studies. The sessions provide new scholars a forum to present their ideas and methods and an opportunity to receive constructive feedback from senior scholars who will serve as respondents. *Note – IAS is sponsoring two of the four sessions.
Session I
Vincenzo Sorrentino, University of Pisa, “Seeking a Roman Identity: the del Riccio and Michelangelo.”
Stephen Mack, Rutgers University, “New Approaches to Non Finito. A Rough Aesthetic After Donatello and Before Michelangelo.”
Elena Cera, University of Padua, “The Putti of the Thrones. A Classical Model for the Renaissance Spiritello.”
Respondent: William Wallace, Washington University, St. Louis
Session II
Sara Bova, University of Venice, “Cultural and Architectural Syncretism in Quattrocento Rome: The Patronage of Venetian Cardinal Marco Barbo (1420–1491).”
Lindsay Sheedy, Washington University, St. Louis, “A Feast for Worms: The Rise and Fall of the Presepe in Early Modern Naples.”
Respondent: Sarah McHam, Rutgers University
Session III
Amanda Hilliam, Oxford Brookes University, UK, “Against Naturalism: Carlo Crivelli’s Artifice.”
Eveline Baseggio Omiccioli, Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, “When Faith Meets Philosophy and Politics: Girolamo Donato at Santa Maria dei Servi in Venice.”
Massimiliano Simone, Université de Vincennes – Paris 8, “Vulcan’s Polymorphism: The Cases of Villa Farnesina and Furioso.
Respondent: Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University
Session IV
Bar Leshem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, “ ‘Warning’ Imagery on Sixteenth-Century Italian Cassoni.”
Negar Rokhgar, Rutgers University, “Between Imperial Self-Fashioning and Anti-Ottoman Alliance: Persian Gifts and Embassies in Venetian Visual Culture.”
Respondent: Cristelle Baskins, Tufts University
Visual Networks of Healing in Renaissance Italy
Organizers and chairs: Sandra Cardarelli, University of Aberdeen, UK; Valentina Živković, Institute for Balkan Studies, SASA, Belgrade
This session explores faith and medicine as two of the traditional methods of healing represented in the visual arts in the Renaissance, and how its local and global dimensions influenced Italian art. Visual imagery will be examined to establish the ways in which narratives of healing practices and healing saints were formed and became an integral part of cultural traditions. Healing will be discussed in both its physical and metaphysical dimensions to highlight the ways in which religious and cultural values related to healing translated into shared visual idioms that were sought after, acquired, adapted and effectively utilized to foster new religious cults and/ or healing practices. As imagery was actively used to forge devotional, social and political networks between different locales, main centres and liminal communities, we will examine how the practice and representation of healing differed and influenced dominant cultural centres and the periphery.
Theresa Flanigan, The College of Saint Rose, “Art, Compassion, and Healing at the Tomb of St. Francis in Assisi.”
Louise Marshall, University of Sydney, “Topographies of Salvation: The City Model in Renaissance Plague Images.”
Alessandra Foscati, University of Lisbon, “Healing Saints and Disease: Images and Texts.”
Lively Things: Material Culture in Early Modern Italy
Organizer and Chair: Kelly Whitford, Wheaton College
This panel offers studies of material and visual culture in early modern Italy, c. 1300-1550, that engage questions of enlivenment, agency, presence, and materiality. In the early modern era, works of art seemingly came to life, paintings wept, statues spoke, reliquaries healed, and automata moved. In all these ways (and many others), art, ritual, and cult objects acted as lively things. This panel seeks to examine the blurred lines between beholders and objects in order to broaden our understanding of the interactions between people and material culture in early modern Italy. Scholars invested in this question have been powerfully influenced by David Freedberg and Hans Belting who examined pre-modern images and sculptures that defied the category of the object by seemingly appearing as present and alive. Bissera Pentcheva, Elina Gertsman, Nino Zchomelidse, and Megan Holmes, to name a few, are shaping the field by taking up questions about the multi-sensory, performative, and liminal characteristics of medieval and early modern art and architecture. Additionally, the categorical boundaries defining humans and objects continue to be erased, questioned, and redrawn by scholars of actor network theory, performance theory, new materialism, and thing theory.
Anna Majeski, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, “Astrological Cosmologies and Embodied Viewing in Giusto de’Menabuoi’s Baptistery frescoes.”
Nele De Raedt, Ghent University, “The Protective Power of Architectural Features: Beholders and Buildings in Fifteenth-Century Italy.”
Steven F. H. Stowell, Concordia University, Montreal, “Agency and Origins: Specialized Patronage of Miracle-Working Images in Renaissance Italy.”
Women and Gender in Italian Trecento Art and Architecture
These sessions examine both the patronage and the representation of women in 13th- and 14th-century Italian art, topics that remain under-explored despite the large body of scholarship on women and gender in other cultures and periods. Papers go beyond the stereotypical gender identities and roles promoted by the Church and theological writings, to seek a complex understanding of the models for and the lives of Trecento women.
Session I
Organizer and Chair: Judith Steinhoff, University of Houston
Cordelia Warr, University of Manchester, UK, “Women re/act: Women and Images in Trecento Art.”
Angelica Federici, Cambridge University, “Convents, Clausura and Cloisters: Female Religious Patronage in Medieval Lazio”
Janis Elliott, Texas Tech University, “The Art of Royal Propaganda: Recovering the Queen of Naples’ Reputation.”
Session II: Gendering Images and Architectural Space
Organizer: Judith Steinhoff, University of Houston; Chair: Anne Derbes, Hood College
Judith Steinhoff, University of Houston, “Up Close and Personal: Gendering Small Devotional Ensembles.”
Sarah Wilkins, Pratt Institute, “A Tale of Two Vita Panels: Mary Magdalen as a Gendered Model of Penitence.”
Erik Gustafson, George Mason University, “In the Footsteps of Women: Gender Segregation or Inclusion in Mendicant Churches.”