Events

Whereas drawings only begin to change after they have been drawn, prints can change before, during, and after printing. [more]

Carmen C. Bambach, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will give the opening keynote lecture for “Touched/Retouched: Paper across Time (1400–1800),” a workshop made possible with support from Getty through The Paper Project initiative. [more]

In this conversation, two experts from the field of Renaissance art history examine drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and uncover a particular workshop practice of the artist. [more]

Combining the reading group “Spatial Communities: New Methodologies for Heritage Landscapes” with special guest Christoph Brumann’s work on heritage agnosticism, this one-morning reading workshop aims to connect individual research projects with the most pressing questions in heritage studies today. [more]

The UNESCO World Heritage List is a coveted mark of cultural distinction for sites of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). In this talk, Christoph Brumann explains why, despite decades of reform, there is still a North-South imbalance of OUV sites. [more]

Art in Times of War and Peace is an international, interdisciplinary conference that addresses the ways in which conflict and its resolution have historically moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period. [more]

David Bailly’s Portrait of a Painter with Vanity Symbols, signed and dated 1651, has provided us with a rich history of interpretation. Despite scholars’ different approaches and theories, it is generally understood as a painted autobiography in which there has been sustained reflection on the relationship between visibility and invisibility, between figure and ground. [more]

Made by rocking a toothed blade across a plate thousands of times to create a delicate burred surface and then scraping or burnishing the burrs to create tonal gradations, the mezzotint – both as matrix and print – is notoriously fragile. [more]

Cogliendo l’occasione del completamento del restauro degli arazzi allegorici della Primavera e dell’Autunno, che furono tessuti all’inizio del XVII secolo nell’atelier della famiglia Raes riprendendo dei disegni di Francesco Salviati, il convegno Tessere le Stagioni intende approfondire lo studio di questi arazzi – la loro storia, fortuna e iconografia – e indagare altresì una serie di tematiche legate ai processi creativi, alla circolazione e serialità dei motivi, alla materialità e alle pratiche conservative. [more]

The material evidence gathered in recent years during the cleaning, technical examination and conservation of sculptural works by Nicola Pisano and his pupils and collaborators has revealed much about their experimentation with different materials. [more]

Wastework is an international, interdisciplinary conference on the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in the early modern workshop. It proposes to examine acts of disposal, displacement, removal, and abeyance – in short, the getting rid of unwanted things – and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. [more]

Taking a broad chronological approach, this seminar reflects on some of the main moments in terracotta’s critical reception in the modern age. In literary judgements and collecting alike, terracotta seems more than other materials to have passed from the background to the fore of art history several times within the space of a few centuries. [more]

The recent restoration campaign of the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican Apostolic Palace has confirmed that Raphael authored the figures of Iustitia and Comitas, executed in oil on plaster. This talk will situate Raphael’s plan to paint the Vatican room in oils in the broader context of the experimentation with this technique that took place in Central Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. [more]

“The most opposite of all are white and black, since nothing equals the look of black ink against white paper.” With these words Lodovico Dolce (1565) conceptualised the two ends of the colour spectrum. But what was the period’s understanding of black and white when applied to skin colour? Did the artistic practices carried out in workshops influence how Italian Renaissance artists understood skin tone? [more]

Portraiture, Alberti said, promises a permanence across time and space. Early modern artists and audiences had other ideas, though: they frequently interfered with ‘finished’ portraits. Carefully attending to the historical practices behind repainted portraits can help guide approaches to their conservation. [more]