*CFP* "EMOTIONAL OBJECTS - NORTHERN RENAISSANCE AFTERLIVES IN OBJECT, IMAGE AND WORD, 1890S-1920S", A ONE-DAY INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

Emotional Objects – Northern Renaissance Afterlives in Object, Image and Word, 1890s-1920s

A One-Day International Symposium

The Warburg Institute, 22-23 April 2021

 

Keynote Speaker: Prof. dr. Gabriele Rippl, Universität Bern

Organized by Professor Juliet Simpson, FRSA, FRHistS (Coventry University/Warburg Institute)

Supported by The Royal Historical Society, The Warburg Institute, and the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University

 

In 1920 Louis Gillet, the French art historian and internationalist, published a rousing article defending the repatriation of stolen fragments from the Van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece from Germany to Belgium as ‘un drapeau’. His ensign of a Northern patrimony pitched as an emotive call for a different cultural ‘belonging’ post-1918 was part of a pattern. Jean Fouquet’s Melun diptych was vaunted as both a ‘jewel’, yet the opprobrium of France. At its most charged was the identification of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece with extreme War trauma, bodily and mental distress during its 1918-19 Munich display. Yet these Northern Renaissance ‘Afterlives’ remain under-explored. This symposium aims to develop new knowledge of how these and other responses to the Northern Renaissance (in the period spanning the early 1900s-1920s) become activated via objects, images and words in potently emotive contexts of reception, image transfer and cultural memory-making to negotiate conflicts of the present.

Key areas of focus will be to consider the significance of new histories, narratives and emblems of Northern Renaissance visual, material and literary cultures, as well as Northern Renaissance cultural and religious legacies. In particular, the aim will be deeper investigation of their entwining with the cultural modernities of the early twentieth century.

Please send proposals of 300 words max. with a short biography (150 words) to juliet.simpson@sas.ac.uk by 30 September 2020 (midnight BST). Applicants will be notified of outcomes by early October 2020.  A publication based on the conference is planned.

Full details.