We are delighted to announce that our keynote address will be given by Professor Iain Fenlon (King’s College, Cambridge)
There was a strong relationship between music and the visual arts during the Renaissance. The function, meaning, audience and patronage of both strands of the arts were often extremely closely aligned. Music and the visual arts in the Renaissance paralleled one another in the creation (or dissolution) of national style, portrayed the same religious, mythological and secular sources in analogous institutional and private spaces, and drew inspiration from one another in engaging audiences of all types – sacred and secular, elite to illiterate.
The study (and experience) of music and art has occurred largely separately, however. Hence, the wariness of students of Renaissance art and music to explore the relationship between their own discipline and their close yet unfamiliar counterpart has resulted more in the appropriation rather than synthesis of diverse research skills. This symposium hopes to break down these historiographic boundaries and explore the numerous instances of interdisciplinarity that exist in Renaissance scholarship. We invite postgraduate and early career scholars of all disciplines to present instances of this relationship in their research, and to use this symposium as an opportunity for exploratory and open-minded discussion of aural and visual experience in Renaissance culture and historiography. We are particularly keen to encourage participants to consider ways of presenting interdisciplinary research in engaging and inventive ways.
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
- joint musical and commissions
- patronage
- devotional function
- the relationship of art and music to physical space
- audiences / congregations
- relationships between the senses and the arts
- commemorative art and music
- historiography (of interdisciplinary study)
- mnemonics
- curatorial, performative, and museological approaches to Renaissance culture
- contemporary or modern relationships in hermeneutic interpretation
Please send proposals of no more than 250 words and your academic CV by 4 November 2013 to renaissanceartandmusic@gmail.com
Organised by Harriette Peel (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Matthew Laube (Royal Holloway), & Katie Bank (Royal Holloway)
