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

Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh (Jill.Burke@ed.ac.uk)

Genevieve Warwick, University of Glasgow (G.Warwick@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk)

We invite proposals of up to 250 words on the following area by 9
November 2009. Thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, some
funding is available for speakers’ travel costs where institutional
funding is not possible.

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 convenors would welcome papers in any of the
following areas :

– 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.