9.00 |
9.30 |
Registration |
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9.30 |
9.45 |
Introduction |
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9.45 |
10.45 |
Keynote Address |
Anabel Thomas |
The Significance of the Pig. Interrelations between Artistic Practice and Local History
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10.45 |
11.15 |
Refreshment Break |
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11.15 |
11.40 |
Louise Marshall |
The Saint and the City: Identifying the Subject of Giovanni di Paolo’s Vienna Miracle of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino |
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11.40 |
12.05 |
Hugh Hudson |
Beyond Florence: Paolo Uccello in the Contado and
Further Afield
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12.05 |
12.30 |
Nerida Newbigin |
Finding a voice: Frederick III and his visits to Florence in 1452 |
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12.30 |
2.00 |
Lunch Break |
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2.00 |
2.25 |
Peter Howard |
Preaching and Painting in Renaissance Florence
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2.25 |
2.50 |
Diana Hiller |
‘Do You See What I See, Brother?’ The Gendered Conventual Gaze and Judas in Florentine Last Supper
Frescoes
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2.50 |
3.15 |
Robert Gaston |
Meditations on Space, Place, and Recent Florentine Art
History
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3.15 |
3.30 |
Refreshment Break |
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3.30 |
3.55 |
Bill Kent |
Some Reflections on Recent Research on Art and Culture in
Renaissance Tuscany
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4.00 |
5.00 |
Plenary Session |
All speakers |
Reporting on new directions in her own research, and in particular on the methodologies involved in analyzing the demography, topography and cultural contexts of communities and institutions in the southern Sienese contado during the early modern period, Anabel Thomas considers the varying interpretations of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Sala della Pace in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena presented by scholars during the last five or six decades. Thomas explores interrelations between artistic practice and local history against the background of the post-modernist art historical theory that influenced the discipliine during the last years of the twentieth century. Rejecting contemporary notions that the modern art historian need be beset by ‘insanity-inducing despair’, since deconstructivism allows for no settled or final answers, and no seen thing is what it seems, Thomas, while admitting that language is treacherous when attempting to re-construct the past through the analysis of the visual image, considers how changing methodologies, rather than new directions in research, affect our understanding of the past. She argues that there are in effect four interrelated factors: the conceptual frameworks employed, explicitly or implicitly; the subject or locus of research interest which to some extent flows from the conceptual framework, and in turn predicates the research methodologies adopted; and the findings, that point to new directions in approaching the subject and analyzing the surviving visual material.
A graduate of the Courtauld Institute, London, Anabel Thomas first engaged in museum curatorship. She was subsequently associated with the Departments of Italian at Reading, Cambridge and London Universities, as well as, more recently, The Open University. Now living in Tuscany Thomas pursues research in the southern Sienese contado.
This paper aims to resolve scholarly confusion regarding the subject matter of a panel by the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo now in Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Kunst). Art historians are in general agreement regarding the reconstruction of the original altarpiece of to which this narrative once belonged, but remain curiously divided regarding the identification of the specific miracle represented. The Vienna panel has long been associated with another work of almost exactly the same dimensions, depicting the recently canonised Augustinian friar and famous miracle worker Nicholas of Tolentino (d. 1305, canonised 1446) saving a ship at sea (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The two narratives would have flanked a central panel of the standing saint, which still survives in situ in the Augustinian church at Montepulciano, signed by the artist and dated 1456. Drawing on my research into Nicholas’ cult as a plague protector, I will argue for the identification of the scene as Nicholas saving a town from plague.
Dr. Louise Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Sydney, where she teaches Italian late medieval and Renaissance art. Her chief focus of research is Renaissance plague images, on which she has published articles in scholarly journals and essay collections. More recently, she has published on the Augustinian saint Nicholas of Tolentino as a plague protector and as an intercessor for souls in purgatory.
Research into the career of the early
Renaissance artist Paolo
Uccello took an unexpected turn in 1979 when an unknown mural painting of the Adoration
of the Child emerged from
under a layer of whitewash during restoration in the sacristy of the church of
S. Martino Maggiore in Bologna. A partially legible date shows it was executed
in the 1430s, spurring art historians to reconsider the virtually impenetrable
subject of Uccello’s early career. It was also a reminder of how much work
remains to be done to explain the activities of itinerant early Renaissance
artists. Due to the relative abundance of archival
material in Florence, art historians have often overlooked the extent to which
early Renaissance artists like Uccello travelled, and in spite of new
discoveries, much remains to be done to explain the social, religious,
political, cultural, and financial networks that facilitated artists
undertaking distant commissions, and to explain why patrons looked far afield
for artists to execute their commissions. This paper proposes that there remain
areas of research to be explored and new methodologies to be exploited to
illuminate the subject of Uccello’s itinerant career in the Florentine contado (sovereign territories) and the cities of Venice, Prato, Bologna,
Padua, and Urbino, amounting potentially to a significant addition to the
familiar image of Uccello as a quintessential Florentine early Renaissance
artist.
Hugh Hudson is a Fellow of the School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and
Archaeology whose chief research interests lie in the areas of Italian and
Netherlandish early Renaissance art and social history, the scientific
analysis and conservation of artworks, and the history of collecting. His
work has been published in Australia, Belgium, Holland, and Spain.
My recent research on Frederick III’s visit to Florence in 1452, as he travelled from Vienna to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and to marry Leonora of Portugal, began as an attempt to explain discrepancies in the various accounts. Some sources record the Florentine reception as a model for future imperial visits; others note the series of scandals that threatened to derail the visits. I am fascinated by the narrative voices, the personalities behind them and the emotions – pleasure, enthusiasm, caution, disappointment – of their responses. I am now struggling to construct a readable interpretative narrative that conveys both Florentine management of this huge event and the pleasure of the research. What started as a Florentine answer to Fabrizio Nevola’s account of Frederick in Siena (Renaissance Studies, 17 (2003): 581–606) is now fighting to be a short book, with the luxury of with extended quotations, transcriptions, and footnotes that have pleaded to be admitted to a longer discursive text.
Nerida Newbigin teaches Italian Language and Literature at the University of Sydney. Her current research is on a range of Florentine public spectacle and performance in the fifteenth century. Her most recent publication is a critical edition of a sixteenth-century Sienese comedy, I prigioni di Plauto tradotti da l'Intronati (Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 2006).
Embedded in the Summa Theologica of Archbishop Antoninus of Florence (d. 1459) is a sermon preached
by him around the scripture fragment ‘Adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum’ (I will worship in your holy temple), the middle phrase of a verse
of Psalm 5:8. This prominent and influential preacher draws striking parallels
between the methods used by both preachers and artists to develop their themes,
and goes on to examine the stance of the viewer to an image: ‘One should adore,
however, with the soul through devotion … with the body by genuflecting,
prostrating and suchlike …’.
Peter Howard lectures in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University.
He has published in the area of medieval sermon studies and the Florentine Renaissance, and contributed to Renaissance Florence: ASocial History, ed. R. Crum and J. Paoletti (2006). His current work on the inter-relationship between sermons and frescoes in the Brancacci and Sistine chapels (forthcoming) seeks to provide new tools for understanding the lived experience of religion, art and oral culture in the Renaissance.
Contemporary
theoretical positions concerning the gendered gaze are very different from
fifteenth-century notions of the use and perception of images. However, if all such standpoints can be
seen as historicised constructs dependent upon situation and culture, it may be
that a number of the perspectives can be drawn upon in order to shed light on
the way that some
images were perceived in the early modern period. Images of Christ’s Last Supper were to be found in most conventual refectories in fifteenth-century
Florence. The male and female
religious observers of the monumental frescoes not only brought a gendered
perspective to the viewing process, but also gazed on the images in a
profoundly gendered cultural environment. The paper focuses on the figure of Judas in the images in an attempt to
explore how context and gender may have contributed to different perceptions of
these works.
Diana Hiller is a postgraduate student in the School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne. She is working on gendered perceptions of Last Supper frescoes in Florentine conventual refectories in the Quattrocento under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. David Marshall
The recently published
volume, John Paoletti and Roger Crum (eds.), Renaissance Florence: A Social
History, Cambridge, CUP 2006
is one of several books published lately that document a bridging over from art
and architectural history to social history in some of its manifestations. The
paper is a series of reflections arising from the creative yet troubled genesis
of this collection, concentrating on the author’s own contribution on
Florence’s churches. It explores how writing this chapter along the lines
suggested by the collection’s original manifesto (‘space in Renaissance
Florence’) was in fact thwarted by the evidence that came to light in the
research process. This raises the issue of how a research paradigm can have a
heuristic value—opening up the field to valuable investigation—but
might still be found wanting in a concrete instance of applied research.
This brief paper will discuss the writer's
recent, somewhat tortuous,
attempts to draft an historian's ‘framing’ chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Florentine Renaissance Art, ed F. Ames-Lewis; with particular reference, among other recent
work, to the newest publication in the field, Renaissance Florence: A Social
History, ed. R. Crum and J. Paoletti (2006), the
contributions to which seek to
exemplify novel directions and methodologies.
