Appel à communication : « Fifty years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture (London 2014) »

Call for Papers:
Fifty years after Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: New Approaches, New Perspectives, New Material
London, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 21 June 2014
Deadline: 16 February 2014

‘Tomb Sculpture will remain….among the basic works which determine turning points in the history of our discipline’. (Review in Art Bulletin, 1967)

The Courtauld Institute will be holding a one-day conference in 2014 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, comprising the lectures delivered originally in the fall of 1956 at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Panofsky’s lectures represented a new attempt to consider funerary monuments as artistic objects, charting developments in their iconography, style, form and function within the broader chronology of art history.  Panofsky also emphasised the importance of tombs as evidence for changing (and sometimes contradictory) attitudes towards the deceased.

The aim of this conference is to showcase the developments in research techniques and approaches that have led to new insights into tomb sculpture. The core period covered by the conference will be Medieval to Early Modern, but papers up to the current day will be considered. The core geographic focus will be Europe.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Panofsky’s approach to funerary sculpture and the legacy of his work
• Iconography of tombs
• Materials and their symbolic importance
• Audience and reception
• Monuments and the liturgy
• Function of tombs- prospective/retrospective, devotional, legal, etc.
• Inscriptions, epitaphs, heraldry
• Technical investigation
• Components of monuments with a low survival rate, e.g. covers, testers, railings
• Brasses

Logistics:

• Length of paper: 20 minutes
• Expenses: funds are not available to cover participants’ expenses

This is an opportunity for doctoral and early career scholars to share their research. We plan to publish a collection of edited essays arising from the conference. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words and a brief biography to tombsculpture@gmail.com no later than Sunday 16 February 2014.

Organised by Professor Susie Nash, Ann Adams and Jessica Barker (The Courtauld Institute of Art).