The First Annual Postgraduate Renaissance Symposium: ‘Beyond the Frame: Portraits and Personal Experience in Renaissance Europe, c.1400 – 1650’
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, April 28, 2012
Proposals submission deadline: 20 January 2012
Organised by: Emily Gray and Harriette Peel (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
In Renaissance art historical scholarship, the category of the portrait has provided a key framework for thinking about and discussing representations of the individual, an emphasis that has been echoed in a range of recent exhibitions celebrating Renaissance ‘faces’.
The inaugural Renaissance postgraduate symposium invites new scholars to explore the limits of this framework. It aims to encourage students of the Renaissance, in its broadest definition, to consider the domestic, devotional and urban environments of portraits. Contributors are invited to consider how the experience of viewing, commissioning and living with portraits affects our understanding of their meaning and function, situating the images within their historical contexts rather than within the museum’s exhibition space. Likewise, we invite participants to challenge the terminology of portraiture and to consider objects and images which do not fit into the conventional category of the ‘portrait’ but which nevertheless ‘portray’ individuals.
Please send proposals of 250 words for papers of 20 minutes, and a short biography to:
renaissance.consortium@courtauld.ac.uk by 20 January 2012.
