Books by Robert Wellington
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Review of Antiqurianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV by Louis Marchesano, Curator of Pri... more Review of Antiqurianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV by Louis Marchesano, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Getty Research Institute.
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Review of Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV by Fabrice Charton, H-France
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A review of Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV by noted scholar of Louis XIV me... more A review of Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV by noted scholar of Louis XIV medals and former director of the V & A, Sir Mark Jones.
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Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV - Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new... more Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV - Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new interpretation of objects and images commissioned by Louis XIV (1638–1715) to document his reign for posterity. The Sun King’s image-makers based their prediction of how future historians would interpret the material remains of their culture on contemporary antiquarian methods, creating new works of art as artifacts for a future time. The need for such items to function as historical evidence led to many pictorial developments, and medals played a central role in this. Coin-like in form but not currency, the medal was the consummate antiquarian object, made in imitation of ancient coins used to study the past. Yet medals are often elided from the narrative of the arts of ancien régime France, their neglect
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www.ashgate.comwholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV’s history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand siècle.
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Journal articles by Robert Wellington
This article investigates the influence of Louis XIV imagery on medals and tapestries commissione... more This article investigates the influence of Louis XIV imagery on medals and tapestries commissioned by the first duke of Marlborough and his supporters from 1703 to 1711. To commemorate the martial ascendency of Britain, Marlborough and his allies employed models of representation developed for the Sun King by his image-makers to document his history visually. Here this is argued to be an act akin to spoliation — the theft of artefacts by a victor as symbolic enslavement of the vanquished enemy — ironically revealing the abiding influence of French culture on British material histories of the early eighteenth century.
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This article traces the origins of a cycle of military paintings produced by Adam Franz van der M... more This article traces the origins of a cycle of military paintings produced by Adam Franz van der Meulen for Louis XIV's chateau at Marly to chorography, an early mode of mapping.
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Book chapters by Robert Wellington
From the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century Louis XIV regularly presented medals, and ... more From the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century Louis XIV regularly presented medals, and books that accompanied them, as gifts to dignitaries from non-European nations. They were given to the monarchs, ambassadors, and warriors from diverse cultures in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As they travelled around the world, the symbolism of these medals created to celebrate the reign of Louis XIV, his legacy, and his dynasty was surprisingly mobile, with the potential to accrue different meanings in each and every new cultural context. The failure of these medals to retain meanings across cultures reveals that they are not the stable historical documents that Louis XIV’s image-makers wanted them to be.
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Conference papers by Robert Wellington
Medals sent from Versailles to the Indigenous people of Nouvelle France under the auspices of Lou... more Medals sent from Versailles to the Indigenous people of Nouvelle France under the auspices of Louis XIV and Louis XV will be the focus of this paper. Versailles became a global center in the late seventeenth century, and stories abound of the foreign envoys that came there from afar to pay tribute to the kings of France. Less known, perhaps, is the delegation of First Nations People from Midwest America who visited Versailles in November 1725. Louis XV presented each of them with a gold medal on a chain, a gift of particular significance to these Amerindian ambassadors. Over the preceding fifty years, commemorative medals were regularly presented to Indigenous allies of the colonists in Nouvelle France, and they had come to be highly prized among them. While France would lose her colonies in the New World in 1763, these medals remained the treasured possessions of Amerindian people, transformed by a local symbolic economy into talismans of friendship, masculinity, and valour.
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Autumn from the Seasons tapestries is a complex and multivalent object: luxurious décor for the S... more Autumn from the Seasons tapestries is a complex and multivalent object: luxurious décor for the Sun King’s palaces and a princely gift for foreign allies. These plush textiles are among the most seductive objects of soft power produced in the ancien-régime. But this is also an object designed to outlast its decorative and political efficacy. It was devised as an artifact for a future time to communicate the magnificence of Louis XIV to posterity.
This tapestry, designed in the early 1660s belongs to a formative and experimental period in Louis XIV’s iconography. At that time, Jean-Baptiste Colbert brought together a committee of humanists responsible for a project that would harness the fine and decorative arts to secure eternal fame for the monarch. Colbert and his Petite Académie planned for the longevity of the tapestries that they commissioned on the king’s behalf from the Gobelins, publishing prints and explications of their designs that were sent to the four corners of the World. To guarantee the king’s reputation, his gloire, required a careful balance of intellectual, poetic imagery to set an appropriate tone of praise, with the need for precise, legible information for historical specificity. The Autumn tapestry is an object of luxury, to be sure, but it is also a piece laden with historical information.
The design of tapestry cycles in the early 1660s initiated discussions about the use of allegory in works of art that document the king’s history, leading to two distinct but contemporaneous types of image: metaphorical compositions that use symbols, personifications and allegory to refer to the king’s virtues, and events from his reign; and eyewitness scenes that eschew the veil of allegory to recount events more directly. The Petite Académie championed the former, composing learned inscriptions and designs for emblems and medals; Charles Le Brun too with his penchant for high-minded allegory. The latter was the preserve of Adam-Franz Van der Meulen, who authored many prints and paintings of Louis XIV’s deeds. The Autumn tapestry brings these pictorial modes together with Le Brun’s allegory, the Petite Académie’s inscriptions and emblems, and Van der Meulen’s vignette of the king hunting. Drawing upon Colbert’s correspondence with the Petite Academie and the contemporary publication dedicated to the series of tapestries to which this piece belongs, I aim to unbind these interwoven approaches to history-making found in the Autumn tapestry currently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
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French Poet Jean Chapelain (1595-1674) once described devices on the reverse of commemorative med... more French Poet Jean Chapelain (1595-1674) once described devices on the reverse of commemorative medals as consisting of a “body and a soul,” its emblem being the corporeal form of the concept or event commemorated and the inscription its anima. Here the mind–body dualism espoused by seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes is used as an analogy for the inextricable nature of the text and image on a medal: the body would lay dead and inanimate without its soul, and the soul immaterial without a body. The text–image relationship in coins and medals was seen to be inseparable—if they were viewed in isolation, the pictorial type and linguistic legend would be rendered incomplete and could not yield the same level of historical information. To decode the medal required the specialist antiquarian knowledge. This paper questions how medals produced to celebrate the reign of Louis XIV were received outside of Europe, beyond the humanist and antiquarian networks that fuelled the demand for their esoteric allegories and learned Latin inscriptions.
The medals that Louis XIV presented as diplomatic gifts and rewards to people from non-European nations represent both the success and failure of these objects to transmit ideas across cultures. These gifts carried symbolic value, representing Louis XIV through his portrait and with an allegorical devise relating to some aspect of his reign, but as they were made from solid silver or gold they also had monetary worth. It was hoped that these inert precious metals would preserve the imagery on the king’s medals from the rages of time, so that they might continue the king’s memory in perpetuity as the gold and silver coins of the ancient Greek and Roman emperors had done so successfully. But the intrinsic value of these materials also made them vulnerable to being melted down. As they travelled around the world, the symbolism of medals created to celebrate the reign of Louis XIV, his legacy, and his dynasty was surprisingly mobile, with the potential to accrue different meanings in each and every new cultural context. This paper tracks the changing fates of these pictorial bodies as they moved into the cultural spaces of Siam, Persia, and Nouvelle France.
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In 1706 Louis XIV received Nescambiouit, a chief from the indigenous Abenaki tribe of Nouvelle Fr... more In 1706 Louis XIV received Nescambiouit, a chief from the indigenous Abenaki tribe of Nouvelle France, at Versailles. Legend has it that this distinguished warrior raised his hand to the French king and claimed that “this hand has slain 140 of your majesties enemies in New England,” whereupon Louis XIV presented him with a sabre, a gold commemorative medal suspended on a chain, and a pension for life. The gift of Louis XIV medals became an important mark of distinction among Abenaki warriors, and the officers of the French colony would require a steady supply of them to meet the needs of the indigenous people who fought alongside them. Indeed, these medals were so highly regarded by the Iroquois they were among the items that warriors would take with them to the grave.
However, the medal presented to Abenaki warriors was not designed expressly for this purpose. It was originally struck to celebrate the birth of the duc de Berry, Louis XIV’s third grandson in the line of primogeniture, carrying a bust of the French King on one side and the portraits of his four heirs on the other. With its labeled portraits and terse Latin inscription, the Famille Royale medal was designed in emulation of ancient Greek and Roman coins and was intended to form a durable monument to the house of Bourbon to guarantee its memory into the distant future. But how was an object such as this received outside of Europe, beyond the humanist and antiquarian networks that fuelled the demand for such things? This paper will aim to address this question by tracing the shifting meaning of the Famille Royale medal as it moved from the context of the French Court, into the hands of the indigenous people of Nouvelle France in the early eighteenth century.
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This paper analyses the place of Louis XIV’s medals, and texts that describe them, in French inte... more This paper analyses the place of Louis XIV’s medals, and texts that describe them, in French international diplomacy during the reign of le Roi Soleil. When the ambassadors of King Phra Narai of Siam came to France in 1686 they brought with them lavish gifts to honor their royal host. Among the many items the Siamese ambassadors received in return as they toured the king’s domains were large gold and silver medals struck to commemorate the grandeur of Louis XIV. These medals were presented in lavishly decorated cases along with written explanations of their iconography. Likewise, when Louis XIV’s ambassador to Persia, Pierre-Victor Michel, was sent to Isfahan in the early-eighteenth century he took with him large silver medals of Louis XIV along with a copy of Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand translated into Persian by François Pétis de la Croix.
Analysis of the iconography of the medals chosen to represent Louis XIV and his nation to foreign courts will be presented here alongside an examination of archival material relating to the production and distribution of these medals as diplomatic gifts. This study reveals the political message that medals could convey as part of a sophisticated diplomatic engagement between France and her foreign allies. Moreover, it provides an insight into the dissemination of Louis XIV’s histoire métallique as a means to perpetuate the history of the king beyond the confines of ancien régime France.
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Books by Robert Wellington
ASHGATE
www.ashgate.comwholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV’s history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand siècle.
Journal articles by Robert Wellington
Book chapters by Robert Wellington
Conference papers by Robert Wellington
This tapestry, designed in the early 1660s belongs to a formative and experimental period in Louis XIV’s iconography. At that time, Jean-Baptiste Colbert brought together a committee of humanists responsible for a project that would harness the fine and decorative arts to secure eternal fame for the monarch. Colbert and his Petite Académie planned for the longevity of the tapestries that they commissioned on the king’s behalf from the Gobelins, publishing prints and explications of their designs that were sent to the four corners of the World. To guarantee the king’s reputation, his gloire, required a careful balance of intellectual, poetic imagery to set an appropriate tone of praise, with the need for precise, legible information for historical specificity. The Autumn tapestry is an object of luxury, to be sure, but it is also a piece laden with historical information.
The design of tapestry cycles in the early 1660s initiated discussions about the use of allegory in works of art that document the king’s history, leading to two distinct but contemporaneous types of image: metaphorical compositions that use symbols, personifications and allegory to refer to the king’s virtues, and events from his reign; and eyewitness scenes that eschew the veil of allegory to recount events more directly. The Petite Académie championed the former, composing learned inscriptions and designs for emblems and medals; Charles Le Brun too with his penchant for high-minded allegory. The latter was the preserve of Adam-Franz Van der Meulen, who authored many prints and paintings of Louis XIV’s deeds. The Autumn tapestry brings these pictorial modes together with Le Brun’s allegory, the Petite Académie’s inscriptions and emblems, and Van der Meulen’s vignette of the king hunting. Drawing upon Colbert’s correspondence with the Petite Academie and the contemporary publication dedicated to the series of tapestries to which this piece belongs, I aim to unbind these interwoven approaches to history-making found in the Autumn tapestry currently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The medals that Louis XIV presented as diplomatic gifts and rewards to people from non-European nations represent both the success and failure of these objects to transmit ideas across cultures. These gifts carried symbolic value, representing Louis XIV through his portrait and with an allegorical devise relating to some aspect of his reign, but as they were made from solid silver or gold they also had monetary worth. It was hoped that these inert precious metals would preserve the imagery on the king’s medals from the rages of time, so that they might continue the king’s memory in perpetuity as the gold and silver coins of the ancient Greek and Roman emperors had done so successfully. But the intrinsic value of these materials also made them vulnerable to being melted down. As they travelled around the world, the symbolism of medals created to celebrate the reign of Louis XIV, his legacy, and his dynasty was surprisingly mobile, with the potential to accrue different meanings in each and every new cultural context. This paper tracks the changing fates of these pictorial bodies as they moved into the cultural spaces of Siam, Persia, and Nouvelle France.
However, the medal presented to Abenaki warriors was not designed expressly for this purpose. It was originally struck to celebrate the birth of the duc de Berry, Louis XIV’s third grandson in the line of primogeniture, carrying a bust of the French King on one side and the portraits of his four heirs on the other. With its labeled portraits and terse Latin inscription, the Famille Royale medal was designed in emulation of ancient Greek and Roman coins and was intended to form a durable monument to the house of Bourbon to guarantee its memory into the distant future. But how was an object such as this received outside of Europe, beyond the humanist and antiquarian networks that fuelled the demand for such things? This paper will aim to address this question by tracing the shifting meaning of the Famille Royale medal as it moved from the context of the French Court, into the hands of the indigenous people of Nouvelle France in the early eighteenth century.
Analysis of the iconography of the medals chosen to represent Louis XIV and his nation to foreign courts will be presented here alongside an examination of archival material relating to the production and distribution of these medals as diplomatic gifts. This study reveals the political message that medals could convey as part of a sophisticated diplomatic engagement between France and her foreign allies. Moreover, it provides an insight into the dissemination of Louis XIV’s histoire métallique as a means to perpetuate the history of the king beyond the confines of ancien régime France.
ASHGATE
www.ashgate.comwholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV’s history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand siècle.
This tapestry, designed in the early 1660s belongs to a formative and experimental period in Louis XIV’s iconography. At that time, Jean-Baptiste Colbert brought together a committee of humanists responsible for a project that would harness the fine and decorative arts to secure eternal fame for the monarch. Colbert and his Petite Académie planned for the longevity of the tapestries that they commissioned on the king’s behalf from the Gobelins, publishing prints and explications of their designs that were sent to the four corners of the World. To guarantee the king’s reputation, his gloire, required a careful balance of intellectual, poetic imagery to set an appropriate tone of praise, with the need for precise, legible information for historical specificity. The Autumn tapestry is an object of luxury, to be sure, but it is also a piece laden with historical information.
The design of tapestry cycles in the early 1660s initiated discussions about the use of allegory in works of art that document the king’s history, leading to two distinct but contemporaneous types of image: metaphorical compositions that use symbols, personifications and allegory to refer to the king’s virtues, and events from his reign; and eyewitness scenes that eschew the veil of allegory to recount events more directly. The Petite Académie championed the former, composing learned inscriptions and designs for emblems and medals; Charles Le Brun too with his penchant for high-minded allegory. The latter was the preserve of Adam-Franz Van der Meulen, who authored many prints and paintings of Louis XIV’s deeds. The Autumn tapestry brings these pictorial modes together with Le Brun’s allegory, the Petite Académie’s inscriptions and emblems, and Van der Meulen’s vignette of the king hunting. Drawing upon Colbert’s correspondence with the Petite Academie and the contemporary publication dedicated to the series of tapestries to which this piece belongs, I aim to unbind these interwoven approaches to history-making found in the Autumn tapestry currently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The medals that Louis XIV presented as diplomatic gifts and rewards to people from non-European nations represent both the success and failure of these objects to transmit ideas across cultures. These gifts carried symbolic value, representing Louis XIV through his portrait and with an allegorical devise relating to some aspect of his reign, but as they were made from solid silver or gold they also had monetary worth. It was hoped that these inert precious metals would preserve the imagery on the king’s medals from the rages of time, so that they might continue the king’s memory in perpetuity as the gold and silver coins of the ancient Greek and Roman emperors had done so successfully. But the intrinsic value of these materials also made them vulnerable to being melted down. As they travelled around the world, the symbolism of medals created to celebrate the reign of Louis XIV, his legacy, and his dynasty was surprisingly mobile, with the potential to accrue different meanings in each and every new cultural context. This paper tracks the changing fates of these pictorial bodies as they moved into the cultural spaces of Siam, Persia, and Nouvelle France.
However, the medal presented to Abenaki warriors was not designed expressly for this purpose. It was originally struck to celebrate the birth of the duc de Berry, Louis XIV’s third grandson in the line of primogeniture, carrying a bust of the French King on one side and the portraits of his four heirs on the other. With its labeled portraits and terse Latin inscription, the Famille Royale medal was designed in emulation of ancient Greek and Roman coins and was intended to form a durable monument to the house of Bourbon to guarantee its memory into the distant future. But how was an object such as this received outside of Europe, beyond the humanist and antiquarian networks that fuelled the demand for such things? This paper will aim to address this question by tracing the shifting meaning of the Famille Royale medal as it moved from the context of the French Court, into the hands of the indigenous people of Nouvelle France in the early eighteenth century.
Analysis of the iconography of the medals chosen to represent Louis XIV and his nation to foreign courts will be presented here alongside an examination of archival material relating to the production and distribution of these medals as diplomatic gifts. This study reveals the political message that medals could convey as part of a sophisticated diplomatic engagement between France and her foreign allies. Moreover, it provides an insight into the dissemination of Louis XIV’s histoire métallique as a means to perpetuate the history of the king beyond the confines of ancien régime France.
Our investigation will focus on the Thirty-six Views of Bishu Shangzhuang (c.1714) engraved by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ripa with the assistance of local artists, in response to the Kangxi Emperor’s request to have his new palace documented with Western-style prints. This volume is the first to document a Chinese royal palace and its gardens from multiple sites and perspectives with a combination of text and image, and the striking similarity between this album and the views of French palaces gifted to Kangxi strongly suggests iconographic and conceptual borrowings from the French precedent. This paper will facilitate a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural artistic exchange developing out of diplomatic gifts between Louis XIV and the Kangxi Emperor.
It has long been known that these elite men of letters drawn from the Académie Française played an active role in the ‘fabrication’ of the King. However, this paper argued that they also were the official interpreters of Louis XIV’s visual histories through a process of inscribing the images produced under their auspices, alongside the publication of official catalogues of the tapestries, paintings and medals that represent the King’s deeds.
The ardent admiration for glyptic art was reflected in the works of many artists from Botticelli to Rubens, who referenced cameos and intaglios, sometimes through a painted copy of the jewel, but more often as a source for iconography and composition. This talk will examine the various ways in which these ancient and exquisite objects were a source of inspiration to the ‘Old Masters.’
The day-long public event at the Washington Square Campus of NYU brings together an international group of scholars to explore connections between Versailles and a wide variety of geographical regions and cultures, from Thailand to Tunisia to Dutch Brazil. Papers focus on a range of visual and material culture that relates to cross-cultural exchanges at Versailles in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the depiction of ambassadorial visits to the palace; gifts to and from the French Court; objects and images made for Versailles and its inhabitants that depict non-European cultures or reveal cross-cultural resonances; exoticism and fashion; and examples of art and architecture made outside of Europe that were inspired by Versailles.
Versailles in the World, 1660-1789 is timed to coincide with the preparation of a major exhibition on the foreign visitor at Versailles that will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2017. It has been made possible through the generous support of New York University, Bard Graduate Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Recasting the Question: Digital Approaches in Art History and Museums is a day-long symposium exploring the application of digitally-based methods to the study and presentation of art and architecture in universities and museums. Bringing together international experts in digital art history and exhibition with leaders in the field in Australia, Recasting the Question offers the opportunity to explore the critical and scholarly issues that animate this emerging discipline through a series of projects focused on art and architecture from Australia and around the world.
Speakers will use current research projects as jump off points for thinking through the ideas and issues that stand behind their projects and how those ideas have evolved from (or relate to) the field as it has conventionally been known and practiced.
This symposium brings together leading Turkish and Australian academics to explore the impact of that event on Australian and Turkish art, architecture and material culture and to critically assess the role of visual culture in mediating the conflict’s significance within both polities.
By creating a dialogue between Turkish and Australian scholars, the symposium aims to encourage new approaches to the narrative of an event of shared national significance. Participants will explore a range of themes including loss, memory and memorialisation, cultural identity and cross-cultural contact. The scope of inquiry into the role of visual culture will range from national myth to personal memory, from high art and public modes of performative commemoration to the everyday.
The symposium is funded by the Power Institute, University of Sydney, and Art Gallery of NSW, and supported by the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, ANU and Yale University. It is convened jointly by Dr Robert Wellington (ANU), Dr Andrew Yip (Art Gallery of NSW and University of NSW) and Associate Professor Mary Roberts (University of Sydney)
Session: Visual Vocabularies of History and Authority
Session Chair: Robert Wellington, Australian National University
Abstract:
The aesthetics of political discourse matter now as never before. In the information age, the visual rhetoric of governance and dissent transfers instantaneously and duplicates exponentially across the globe. The power of objects and images to convey political ideologies has an ancient lineage, with portraits of the deified emperors of ancient Greece and Rome sent to the farthest reaches of their empires by way of coins, statues and other monuments. It was these remains of the classical world that inspired a renewed emphasis on secular political imagery at the dawn of the modern age in Europe. Princes of the church and state sought to buttress their claims to power through the buildings, monuments and works of art that they commissioned. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment artists and intellectuals used the arts to support new political agendas and to destabilize the authority of the old regime. By the mid-nineteenth century the avant-garde challenged the conservative structures of visual discourse that remained in the academies of painting and sculpture that had survived the age of revolutions. This conventional narrative of Western art as a vehicle for political expression has been the foundation of social histories of art.
This session seeks papers that interrogate the visual vocabularies of political authority found in images, objects, and buildings of the modern age (broadly conceived, 1400-present). Papers might address histories of contemporary political imagery with reference to historical precedents or vice versa. Those who seek to challenge or problematize Marxist readings of art and visual culture with reference to non-western material; the deconstruction of master narratives of art history; and post-colonial debates about centers of power and their peripheries will be especially welcome.
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a short CV to Robert Wellington (robert.wellington@anu.edu.au) by April 1 2016.
Conference: History and Authority: Political Vocabularies of the Modern Age
Venue: Australian National University
Date: July 28-29, 2016
Conference webpage: http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/history-and-authority-political-vocabularies-modern-age-july-2016-call-papers
We invite proposals for papers that investigate concepts of image, space and materiality in early modern objects. Papers might explore the relationship between substance, iconography and meanings in any aspect of early modern art and design in a global context. Those that identify shifting interpretations of material forms as they move into new cultural and historical contexts are especially welcome.
This panel investigates images and objects as a means for inscribing and mobilizing ideas across societies and cultures during the long eighteenth century.
Whether visual, textual or architectural, the arts serve as a medium through which ideas may be constructed and conveyed. Thanks to dramatic developments in scientific knowledge, technologies of production, economic systems, and global movement and communication, the ways in which people interacted with, imagined and recorded themselves and others expanded and evolved markedly during the long eighteenth century. Visual and material culture was central to this process, as modes of engagement with the physical and represented world evolved as well. Prints, books, textiles and decorative objects, in turn, figured prominently in the movement of information and ideas within and across cultures, as visual or written material often served as metonymic substitutes or performative contexts for a foreign other.
Submissions are invited from scholars of all periods, from antiquity to the present, and may deal with any media from the traditional fine arts of painting, sculpture and print, to photography, film and new media. Some suggested themes include, but are not limited to: proximity to power – court artists and their place within the ruling strata; the patron-amateur – the creative partnership between artist and patron; the mediated image – official structures and strategies for mediating the historical image; historiography – re-imaging history to reflect current ideas; or ideological images – how political structure is reiterated through the production of visual histories.