Renaissance portrait symposium in London
March 8 2012
Picture: Courtauld
This looks interesting, a symposium at the Courtauld on Saturday 28th April 'Beyond the Frame: Portraits and Personal Experience in Renaissance Europe'. There's an illustrious selection of speakers, admission is free, and you don't need to book.
As is increasingly the case these days, the art historical blurb needs reading twice if you're not fluent in the lingo:
In Renaissance art historical scholarship, the category of the portrait has provided a key framework for thinking about and discussing representations of the individual, an emphasis that has been echoed in a range of recent exhibitions celebrating Renaissance ‘faces’.
The inaugural Renaissance postgraduate symposium invites new scholars to explore the limits of this framework. It aims to encourage students of the Renaissance, in its broadest definition, to consider the domestic, devotional and urban environments of portraits. Contributors are invited to consider how the experience of viewing, commissioning and living with portraits affects our understanding of their meaning and function, situating the images within their historical contexts rather than within the museum’s exhibition space. Likewise, we invite participants to challenge the terminology of portraiture and to consider objects and images which do not fit into the conventional category of the ‘portrait’ but which nevertheless ‘portray’ individuals.
