From <http://www.aah.org.uk/page/3224>. The sessions listed below may 
be of interest.

AAH10 CONFERENCE
University of Glasgow
15 – 17 APRIL 2010
The 36th AAH Annual Conference

Conference Convenor: Dr John Richards
Keynote Speakers include: Professor Joseph Koerner - 'Hieronymus Bosch: 
Enemy Painting'
For additional information visit  <http://www.gla.ac.uk/aah10>

CALL FOR PAPERS – Submission deadline 9 November 2009 (Download PDF of 
full session list - includes convenor details 
<http://aah.org.uk/photos/Annual Conference 2010.pdf.).

Paper Proposals: Deadline for the submission is 9th November 2009. 
Please submit proposals directly to the Session Conveners.


Images of Corporal Mortification and
Corruption, Martyrdom and Mercy: 1250–1550

Emily Jane Anderson, University of Glasgow
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Robert Gibbs, University of Glasgow
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The psychological implications of the new religiosity
with which the devotional image was in accord are
just as complex as the social conditions from which
the religious individual developed his self-awareness.
What took place in the thirteenth century was one of
the most comprehensive transformations European
society ever underwent. While the symptoms were
often only visible in images at a later date, the
impulses to modify images reach back to the
thirteenth century.

Hans Belting (trans. M. Bartusis and R. Meyer), The Image and Its Public
in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the
Passion New Rochelle, New York: 1990.

This session will explore images which illustrate the
mortification of the flesh, bodily corruption, disfigurement,
disease, decay, physical degradation and death. Such
images have been used to convey messages of strength,
the triumph of faith over fear and pain, the incorruptibility
of the spirit, salvation, celebration and optimism. Images
of suffering are often coupled with those of compassion
and protection. Issues surrounding the role of gender
within images of martyrdom and mercy will be
investigated. Papers are invited which engage with
related imagery (e.g. depictions of justice, punishment,
vengeance, restraint and clemency) from both religious
and secular contexts and which explore the relationship
between text and image. We encourage submissions
illustrating examples from a wide range of media (panel
and wall painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture,
architectural structures and contexts, decorated
household, religious and civic objects and textiles) and
originating from a variety of geographical locations.


Objects, Art History and Display
Museums and Exhibitions Members Group Session

Heather Birchall, Chair, M&E Group
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Marika Leino, M&E Group committee member
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This session will consider how past and present museum
display has been subject to the changing narratives, art
historical and other, that have shaped the meanings, as
well as the fortunes of objects, during their history. The
shifting status of individual works of art, or types of object,
has presented museum curators and academics with
complex scenarios requiring levels of interpretation both
in public display and academic discourse. From their
potential commission/purchase and initial use and
display, objects have often been transplanted from their
original contexts, they may have been in and out of
fashion, displayed in public or private collections and
sometimes discarded or disposed of, creating a
multifaceted picture which often requires extensive
unravelling. This session will particularly welcome papers
considering the art-historical and museological
challenges of presenting such fluctuating object
narratives to a wider public.

The academic sessions will be held in conjunction with
related talks and ‘behind the scenes’ tours by museum
professionals at different Glasgow museums, which will
take place during the M&E Group strand. (this is currently
under discussion with the Glasgow Museums).


Art in the Public Sphere, Public Spheres In Art:
Middle Ages and Renaissance

Wolfgang Brückle, University of Essex
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Jules Lubbock, University of Essex [log in to unmask]

Art has helped to define spaces for communication in
the public sphere since the middle ages, and its own
basic concepts have been shaped by these processes.
Correspondingly, genres and themes, methods and tasks
have had constantly to be adapted to changing habits
of communication in the political communities of
European cities. Our aim is to address art in the public
sphere from c.1200 to c.1600 with a focus on visual
discourse and aesthetic experience.

We are interested in papers that address the impact of
political discourse on the community’s self-fashioning;
stylistic norms and social distinction through art; the
creation and negotiation of spaces for art and for visual
communication; as well as visual communication shaped
and restricted by public regulation. We are also
interested in the spatial and intellectual frameworks in
which works of art were beheld, discussed, and made
accessible to different audiences. Last but not least, we
are interested in how these issues are visually reflected or
subverted in the works themselves. We especially invite
contributions that go beyond the established text-based
readings of political iconography.


The Artist at Work in Early Modern Italy
(c. 1450–1700): Methods, Materials, Models,
Mimesis

Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh [log in to unmask]
Genevieve Warwick, University of Glasgow
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This session will examine the figure of the artist at work
through a plurality of perspectives to probe issues of
artistic labour in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The
period threw up competing models through which to
constitute the artist’s working environment: as workshop,
studio, academy for teaching, and cultural space for the
production of artist-patron relations. Artistic practice was
contingent on changing techniques and technologies,
methods and materials, yoked to theories of imitation
and invention. This intersection between working tools
such as mirrors and lenses and an early modern
theorisation of art as mimesis, may be traced through
preparatory works as the residue of practice. The
changing deployment and rendering of the artist’s
model bears witness to this history. Portraits of artists also
embody these developments in their changing occlusion
or display of the artist’s studio, models, and working tools.
The session convenors would welcome papers in any of
the following areas:
• Institutions: The Workshop, the Studio, the Academy
• Materials and Methods
• Techniques and Technologies: Tradition and
Innovation
• Preparatory Methods: drawings, sketches, bozzetti,
modelli
•The Artist’s Model
• Artists’ Portraits
• Imitation: Theories and Practices.
• Invention: Art and Science.


Medieval Art/Postcolonial Questions
AHRC Research Network Postcolonising the Medieval
Image

Eva Frojmovic, University of Leeds [log in to unmask]
Catherine Karkov, University of Leeds [log in to unmask]

The application of contemporary theories to pre-modern
art history is often greeted with anxieties about
anachronism. Not only time, but also geography is a
worry: can historians of medieval art break out of a
Eurocentric paradigm? Can ‘medieval’ mean anything
beyond Christian-dominated Europe? Can Europe’s
always shifting and permeable boundaries generate new
questions? Does the ‘Postcolonial’ start in 1948, or are
there other historical moments that can be identified as
postcolonial? Can we create a conversation between
medieval art and postcolonial theories?

The convenors welcome papers which cross boundaries
by engaging with postcolonial theories in the broadest
sense. Both case studies and theoretical papers will be
welcome. Questions speakers might consider include:
• How can concepts current in postcolonial studies in
disciplines such as history and comparative literature
(diaspora and migration, minor artistic cultures,
translation, accented art making, displacement,
intercultural vs transcultural, hybridity, presence/
absence) help medievalists?
• How might postcolonial concepts be used to
interrogate the canon(s) of medieval art?
• To what extent can such theories help bridge the
methodological gap between medievalists and
modernists?
• How might postcolonial questions help to engage a
new generation of students who are alert to the
global reach of art?


Many Hands Make Light Work: The Division,
Status and Valuation of Artistic Labour in
16th- and 17th-Century Northern European Art

Erma Hermens, University of Glasgow
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Christian Tico Seifert, National Gallery of Scotland,
Edinburgh [log in to unmask]

The 17th-century master of a certain status often
supervised a large studio with assistants and apprentices,
assigning them a variety of tasks ranging from preparing
paints to participating in the studio’s production.
Research into the identification of the ‘hand of the
master’ has received ample attention in art historical
studies, and is pursued for example in the Rembrandt
Research Project (University of Amsterdam), and the
Rubens project (Koninlijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten,
Antwerp).

However, this session’s focus will be on the many
collaborative processes and division, exchange, sharing
and valuation of artistic labour, within the artist’s studio,
between studios but also between disciplines and
individual artists of lesser importance than Rembrandt
and Rubens, which so far remain largely unlit but can
provide fascinating insights into contemporary practice.
Specialisation and autonomy within the studio
organisation, sharing and exchanging prints, drawings
and models, tools and materials, the use of ‘freelance’
assistants, as well as the painters’ roles in producing
designs for works in other media, such as decorative arts,
deserve more attention. The tasks artists of a variety of
backgrounds and skills take on in these processes pose
interesting questions about the status and valuation of
invention versus execution. The system of division of
artistic labour as expressed through contracts,
authorisation, and payments provides insights into the
hierarchy within artistic practice and the status of each
individual contributor, which go beyond the
master–apprentice–assistant relationship.

We welcome papers in all disciplines and especially
encourage those using an interdisciplinary approach
(technical art history, social, economic, cultural history
etc.).


The Relic and the City

Helen Hills, University of York [log in to unmask]

Recent years have seen a renewed scholarly interest in
relics and reliquaries amongst art historians, especially
those working outside the medieval period. Relics have
been considered in relation to political power, to
dynastic authority, to gendered devotion, and to
venerational pratices, amongst other important issues. To
date, however, they have been considered above all as
passive objects, valuable items for powerful individuals
and institutions to possess, rather than as active affective
objects productive of change.

Relics occupy curious positions both in relation to time
and space. They look both forward and backward
simultaneously. Thus they can be seen to divide and link
death and life, heaven and earth, heavenly Jerusalem
and earthly city, and to participate in both
simultaneously. They gesture back to the saint’s death
and forward to the resurrection of all humans at the Last
Judgement. This anomalous and ambiguous relationship
to both time and space endows relics with significant
potential. This session investigates that potential with
regard to the city. It aims to explore the relationships
between relics, reliquaries, devotion to relics, and the
city. How might we most productively think the relic-city
relation? How might we usefully map relics? What are the
effects of relic veneration on the city and vice versa? In
what ways have patronal saints’ relics inflected or
contributed to urban developments? How have relics
impacted urbanistically? How did / do relics work to
produce particular forms and practices within urban
spaces and in relation to specific urban institutions and
groups?

If we think of extensive space as that which can be
measured, and of intensive space as that which defies
linear measurement, but as potentially productive of
spiritual, political, and social change, in what ways, and
to what ends might we think of relics in relation to
intensive space? How do relics disrupt extensive space
and with what consequences for cities?


Picturing the Sensorium in Art from Antiquity to
1800

Rachel King, The University of Manchester
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Christopher Plumb, The University of Manchester
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In recent years, scholarship has become increasingly
sensitised to the fact that historical human interaction
with the material world, as it still does today, engaged
not only the visual, but also the spectrum of the sensory
and affective. The result has been a raft of histories of
tasting, smelling, touching and hearing – all of which,
directly or indirectly, work with and extend Baxandall’s
concept of the ‘period eye’. Then, as now, these oral,
aural, visual, olfactory and haptic practices were not only
culturally determined but also often communicated
without written explanation or in transitory form. We
welcome papers that explore the performance of the
senses in art from Antiquity to 1800 (for example hearing
music, touching sculpture, smelling flowers, stroking
animals, tasting food) as well as affective responses, such
as pleasure or disgust. Papers might discuss sensorial
engagement with art and/or its materials in contexts such
as the artist’s studio, domestic interior or gallery/museum.
They could also consider how art reflects the contingent
medical and social contexts of the senses or how artistic
media, for example tapestries or objects to be handled,
were viewed in times when contagion was feared.
Equally, contributions could relate to the inhibition or loss
of the senses, such as the depiction of blindness or the
deterioration of an artist’s own faculties of sight and/or
colour as revealed in his/her writings or work. This panel
welcomes contributions that provide fresh interpretations
of existing knowledge, or presentations of new material
emerging from research, conservation, or archival
discoveries.


Intervisuality in Medieval Art

Debra Higgs Strickland, University of Glasgow
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Of current interest in the critical analysis of medieval art,
intervisuality or interpictoriality may be conceived as the
visual counterpart to intertextuality. Simply defined as
‘pictorial references to other pictures’, studies by Michael
Camille, Madeline Caviness, Cynthia Hahn, and Mitchell
Merback, among others, have shown that the process or
concept itself is anything but simple, and that it can
generate multiple and often complex meanings that
serve particular contemporary cultural agendas. We can
speak of intervisuality, among other ways, in relation to
the redeployment of earlier iconographical formulae in
new contexts, to pictorial references across different
artistic media, to visual correspondences across visual
genres (such as from dramatic performance to static
works of art, or vice versa).
This session invites papers from any disciplinary
perspective that address any aspect of intervisuality with
a focus on one or more works of medieval art, one or
more iconographical themes, or that compare and/or
contrast the processes of intervisuality to those of
intertextuality. The papers may incidentally address one
or more of the following questions: Is intervisuality a
concept or a process? Is it the creation of medieval
artists or audiences? How does intervisuality generate
meaning? What types of cultural work did intervisuality
perform during the Middle Ages?