Harry Prance Read Classics at Cambridge (2010-3). His Interest in Byzantine Art Brought Him to the Courtauld for an MA with Antony Eastmond
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Conference Same Old Things: Speakers’ Abstracts and Bios Harry Prance read Classics at Cambridge (2010-3). His interest in Byzantine Art brought him to the Courtauld for an MA with Antony Eastmond. Harry is now in the second year a CHASE- funded PhD with Prof. Eastmond, working on Middle Byzantine Eucharistic objects, particularly the collection in the Tesoro di San Marco, Venice, and material approaches to Eucharistic experience. Abstract: Confrontations of Value: Bessarion, Bellini and Byzantine Materiality Gentile Bellini’s painting of Cardinal Bessarion with the Bessarion Reliquary in the National Gallery is an astonishing document of Renaissance fascination (both artists’ and viewers’) with the material culture of Byzantium. Bellini’s reliquary fills half the picture and carefully translates the object’s agglomeration of precious stones, gilt and painted scenes into egg tempera. Its materials and figures exist awkwardly out of sight of the picture’s internal worshippers, laid out for the external viewer’s contemplation. This picture both thinks with itself and asks the viewer to think with the very stuff of Byzantine material culture. Not far from the Scuola della Carità, for which Bellini’s reliquary was painted, are the series of tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantine chalices and patens in the Tesoro di San Marco. These objects, probably plunder from the fourth crusade, are deprived of the crutches of classic art historical analysis. They exist without context – physical or documentary. The objects, their figures, forms and materials, become too the primary discursive ground. Michel Foucault began his preface to The Order of Things with a “laughter that shattered”, a laughter prompted by a sense of unease felt when reading Borges’ description of a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia. The Encyclopaedia’s fabulous and elaborate taxonomies suggest a heterotopia, an alternate ordering of the fundamental codes of society from the comfortable scientific delineations of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper will focus upon the materials of the chalices and patens of San Marco and explore how they might elicit a similar sense of heterotopic unease and what happens when we begin to rethink these objects with that in mind. The chalices and patens are united by a luxurious and insistent materiality – each object combining a multimedia array of silver-gilt, pearls, gems, precious stones and enamels in an almost formulaic fashion. These flashing, translucent materials perform a kind of liveliness - what the Byzantines called poikilia (phenomenal presence effects experienced by the senses) - which draws attention to the physical presence of the object. Tracing this lively synthesis of materials across a range of contemporary Byzantine object types – across reliquaries, gospel book covers and phylacteries – I will examine how the shared luxurious materiality of these objects traverses and transgresses traditional art historical object taxonomies, and ask what the interpretive implications are when material memories span all these forms, when a “chalice” begins to look more like a “gospel book” and a “gospel book” more like a “reliquary”. While each of these objects had a distinct and separate religious and liturgical function, a material approach allows the art historian to see behind and across the limits of such a definition to appreciate how the shared sensory experience and coherent materiality of these objects creates mutually-defining relationships across object types. Forthcoming publications like Alexander Nagel and Giancarla Periti’s Ravenna in the Renaissance Imagination attest to a renewed interest in the interaction between Byzantine objects on the Italian peninsular and the art of the Renaissance. This paper hopes not only to suggest a framework for thinking through materials across object categories but also to, in suggesting alternate relationships among Byzantine objects, open up new ways of considering the ways in which Renaissance artists, like Bellini, working and thinking in materials related to the physical heritage of Byzantium. John Witty is a PhD candidate and James Laney Fellow at Emory University, where he is completing a dissertation on the workshop of Paolo Veneziano from which this presentation is adapted. Originally from Miami, Florida, John completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis, completing additional majors in German and Art History. He was awarded a Masters Degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. His early dissertation research was supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. While at Emory, he was awarded the Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Object-Centered Curatorial Research at Atlanta’s High Museum. He is currently the Anne Poulet Fellow at The Frick Collection in New York. Abstract: Alternatives to Cultural Influence and Pictorial Style: an Object-Based Reassessment of Paolo Veneziano’s Workshop Aside from the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, most museums that contain objects associated with the workshop of Paolo Veneziano (doc. 1333-1358) have just one example by the artist. This is more than a mere accident resulting from the scarcity of surviving works. Beginning with Vasari’s Vite that privileged Florence and Tuscany, artists’ pictorial styles have been perceived as intertwined with regional designations. Bernard Berenson’s writings ensured the dominance of regional schools in the Anglo-American narratives of Italian Art History. The continued dominance of regionalism in the tradition of Vasari, Berenson, and others can be read in the distribution of works by Paolo Veneziano in museum collections. The National Gallery in Washington, a collection directly influenced by Berenson’s taste, is a representative example of a dynamic encountered in collections from the Louvre to the museums of Los Angeles. In light of the Byzantinizing label applied to his workshop, one panel by Paolo Veneziano is included in the collection to serve as a foil to the central Italian masters. The dichotomy of the “maniera Greca” vs. the “maniera moderna” first articulated by Vasari continues to hold sway. Close examination of surviving altarpieces by Paolo Veneziano’s workshop reveals a more nuanced narrative than what is represented in museum collections. Existing interpretation of the workshop tends to focus solely on the pictorial styles of the painted panels, ignoring the original frames still preserved in some examples. Drawing on my dissertation research, the proposed presentation will examine specific details in the ornamental frames and painted representations of Paolo Veneziano’s altarpieces. This analysis of ornamental devices will demonstrate how the artist realized a creative synthesis of varied sources of inspiration, including Byzantine pictorial styles and the intricate Gothic aesthetic popular in courtly centers throughout Europe. Rather than merely illustrating the late survival of Byzantine forms in a center understood as Italy’s most Byzantine city, the art of Paolo Veneziano represents a dynamic intersection of media and ornamental design that resulted from Venice’s participation in far-reaching cultural networks. Gerd Micheluzzi is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna. Currently, he finalizes his PhD project on “function and genesis of cast shadows in late medieval and early modern painting”, for which he was awarded a three-year scholarship for outstanding doctoral candidates from the University of Vienna. In his primary research he focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, combining art and art theory with coeval natural philosophy and literature, such as Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Besides various presentations at international conferences, most recently he has authored a forthcoming paper on the murals of the Basilica of San Piero a Grado (Pisa), and co-organized an interdisciplinary conference on medieval studies. Abstract: “Un'invenzione dantesca, dai trecentisti non voluta intendere”? Cast Shadows in Early Modern Painting. An Attempt in Deconstructing the General Narrative. Ever since the formalistic approaches of the late nineteenth century, cast shadows are considered as distinctive features of Renaissance painting. Medieval painting, by contrast, is regarded as cast-shadowless (Wölfflin 1899). Until today, the general narrative is described as an evolutionary progress starting with Giotto and culminating in Masaccio, where humanism, mimesis, central perspective as well as the post-classical return of cast shadows seem to coincide. Consequently, the frescoes of the Cappella Brancacci (c. 1424–27) – in particular Masaccio’s St. Peter Healing with his Shadow – are considered a landmark in this development. Referring to the real-existence of the shadow-casting pilgrim Dante and the transcendency of his shadowless guide Vergil within the Divine Comedy (Purg. III), Longhi (1950), Stoichita (1997), and Belting (2001) argued that cast shadows’ medieval absence reflects ontological intentions – a denial of physical reality, “leading towards piety and devotion” (Sharpe 2017). However, this is challenged by a hitherto neglected, small but highly interesting set of authentic trecentesque cast shadows: to be found in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Last Supper, his illusionistic bench (c. 1320), Taddeo Gaddi’s Annunciation to the Shepherds (c. 1330), and two formerly unnoticed illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1335/1370). While Renaissance