CALL FOR PAPERS: Madonna Revisited: Sites of Invention, Innovation, and Competition, Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meeting, Boston, 31 March – 2 April 2016.
The Virgin and Child represents one of the most enduring visual themes in the history of Western art, and in Vasari and modern textbooks alike, the Renaissance begins with the Madonna. From Bellini and Leonardo to Michelangelo and Raphael, the early Cinquecento is one of the most fertile periods for innovative representations of this subject, and it follows that the Madonna served as a principal venue for contemporary artistic and religious debates.
Citing the Madonna of the Rocks, Rona Goffen argued that images of the Virgin furnished one of the primary sites for artistic rivalry and competition in sixteenth-century Florence. Less considered, however, are the ways in which these examples attest to networks of discourse between artists, their patrons, and the broader religious communities that collected these devotional objects.
We invite proposals that address the following questions:
* How did the Madonna become a chief arena for exchange among artists and patrons?
* What were the visual, theological, and political motors that inspired patterns of production?
* In what ways did these currents stimulate artistic response?
* What were the stakes of individual objects commissioned in this heady atmosphere?
In this panel, we seek new and original contributions that reexamine images of the Madonna in the early sixteenth century and investigate related issues of imitation, innovation, and revision among artists and patrons.
Please send abstracts (no more than 150 words) and a short CV (300-word maximum) to Emily Fenichel and Tracy Cosgriff.
Deadline: 4 May 2015.
Source: H-ArtHist