CALL FOR PAPERS: Brahmins & their Botticelli-s: Italian Renaissance Art & Boston in the late 19C, The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Annual Meeting 2016, Boston, 31 March – 2 April 2016.
American affinity for the culture of Renaissance Italy is most clearly evident in the art market and the climate of collecting as they existed from the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century.
American acquisition of Italian Renaissance art begins, by and large, in Boston, as the first gateway to welcome the European shopping spoils of the Brahmins. Already in the 1860s, the Bostonian James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888) had purchased a large number of such objects with the intent to resell them in America.
By 1870, Quincy Adams Shaw (1825-1908) began to amass his own collection in earnest, with a keen eye for Renaissance sculpture; following his death, these works would become the core of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Shaw would be followed by Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), who was acquiring Italian works with purpose by the 1890s; Gardner’s Fenway Court house museum would open to the public already in 1903.
This session seeks to further explore the agency of Italian Renaissance art in late nineteenth-century America via its first filter of Boston. Papers may engage the objects themselves, or consider the roles of collectors dealers, decorators and advisors, as well as the increasingly influential roles of the emergent art writers and art historians.
Please submit the following details to Lynn Catterson:
1. a paper title (15-word maximum)
2. abstract (150-word maximum)
3. keywords
4. a brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum)
5. general discipline area: History, Art History, Literature, or Other.
Deadline: 9 June 2015.
Source: H-ArtHist