New Approaches to Embodiment and Italian Art
Session will present: In-PersonAffiliated Society or Committee Name: Italian Art Society
Representation and evocation of the bodies of people past have long been a principal concern of Italian Renaissance art and art history. The body had a central place in Christian theology; artists avidly engaged with the Classical nude; potentates and members of the middle class immortalized themselves in portraits; and court commissions provided opportunities for representing otherness. In recent years, research grounded in feminism, queer studies, somaesthetics, performance studies, disability studies, and critical race theory has challenged art historians to rethink early modern bodies, their representation in art, and the historical contingency of corporeal existence. Yet, while the body figures crucially in a vast range of studies on religion, politics, medicine, poetics, play, and many other topics, it is paradoxically all too easy to lose sight of historically embodied experience itself as well as the visual strategies that artists employed to make bodies “matter.” Scholars are thus faced with a persistent and self-renewing challenge to develop methodologies for the study of art and the ever-elusive body. This panel seeks to expand the scope of inquiry into embodiment and Italian art through investigations of the mediating role of art in training the body; treating the non-human as though it has a human body; and the implications of adapting or altering the body through physical or spiritual intervention.
Field(s) of Study:
Geographic Area: Europe
Time Period: Early Modern (1450-1800)
Cultural Spheres: Renaissance
Topics: Figurative/Human Body
Field: Art History
Chair:
Allie L. Terry-Fritsch, Bowling Green State University
Abstract Submissions Closed