Renaissance Care (Panel Sessions at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference)

This session looks at how people and communities in early modernity cared for objects that mattered to them. It aims at moving beyond restoration and treatment, examining instead a broader set of material and immaterial practices aimed at securing and maintaining the object’s well-being. These might include (but are not limited to) acts of physical or symbolic protection and repair; rites of consecration, inauguration, and restitution; as well as what we nowadays describe as preventive conservation, risk management, environment control, and boundary maintenance. Our attention therefore extends to spaces of deposit, storage, and concealment, away from those sites of display (the gallery, the cabinet, the studiolo) that have been the focus of much art-historical research.

The session seeks to contribute to the growing contemporary discourse on the ethics and politics of care by making space for a longer historical analysis of these practices, articulating their differences and exposing where they come into conflict with one another. In examining “Renaissance Care”– who gives care, to what, and for what reasons – we also seek to explore the extent to which caring practices are defined in response to the object’s endangerment, especially in times of conquest or conflict.

Scientific Organization: Francesca Borgo, University of St Andrews and Bibliotheca Hertziana

Program:

Session 1:

Organizer: Francesca Borgo, University of St Andrews and Bibliotheca Hertziana

Chair: Francesca Borgo, University of St Andrews and Bibliotheca Hertziana

Panelists:

Federica Testa, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max Planck Institut
Detaching and Transporting Wall Paintings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Chiara Capulli, University of Cambridge and Bibliotheca Hertziana
The Politics of Stones: Reinstating a Religious Community in Florence after the 1529 Guasto

Ronah Sadan, Aarhus University
Whitewash and Wall Paintings in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

Session 2:

Organizer: Francesca Borgo, University of St Andrews and Bibliotheca Hertziana

Chair: Lisa Pon, University of Southern California

Panelists:
Vendy Hoppe, The University of Manchester
Caring for Velvets in the Renaissance

Bruno Carabellese, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Restoring Raphael: Conseguences of the Renovation of the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace

Grace Harpster, Georgia State University
Old Images in a New Rome: Mosaic Maintenance in the Late Sixteenth Century