Date/Time
Date(s) - 14 Feb 2017
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
The Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance will have its first meeting of the Spring semester on Tuesday, February 14th at 5:30 PM at Faculty House. We will hear a paper by Leatrice Mendelsohn, titled:
“Picturing Reform as an Object of Desire: Implanting Ideology in Mid-Cinquecento Painted Portraits”
Dr. Mendelsohn has kindly provided the following abstract:
“At the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, printed versions of texts issuing from Northern Reformation cities circulated clandestinely throughout Italy. The dangers of translating or reprinting forbidden texts constrained Italian sympathizers to resort to subterfuge in order to spread the word of these ideological tracts. During this initial period of dissemination, groups of adherents banding together sought alternative means to demonstrate their concerned support for change within the Church of Rome forming an analogous movement known as the Catholic Reform. In lieu of replicating words, artists appropriated illustrations and pictorial elements extracted from northern publications. Printed images alluding to altered social conventions and moral states can be read to refer obliquely to reform, hiding subversive meaning in deliberately disguised imagery. Printed book illustrations and ornamental framing devices encircling poetry or emblems, once used to embellish the words of northern reformation publishers, provided fonts for Italian artists to convey ideas sympathetic to the escalating religious schism of the time by visually transforming ideas into objects. They achieved their goal by importing images capable of conveying dual meanings and by imitating a surface reality that provided a cover for communicating forbidden anti-Papal and anti-Imperial leanings.
In this paper, I propose to show that a great variety of books printed in Northern and French publishing houses, intended as sources for painters contained images that were easily endowed with new meaning when transferred into Italian paintings whose patrons shared ideas with the artists they engaged.”
Following the talk at 7 PM, you are invited to join the speaker and other members of the Seminar to continue the discussion over dinner in Faculty House ($30 by check only, payable to Columbia University).
Please make sure to notify our Rapporteur, Barbara Vinck <[email protected]>, by 5 pm on Monday 6 February if you plan to attend, and especially if you plan to dine with us. There is no need to contact the Rapporteur if you do not plan to attend.