Flyer: Theories of Sense-Perception in the 13th and 14th Centuries

The role of Eratosthenic scholarship in the history of alexandrian philology is still mostly underrated, although the indirect tradition has provided us with a fair amount of philological fragments belonging to the grammarian of Cyrene. schol. Ar. Nu. 967a-b (= Eratosth. fr. 14 Bernhardy, 101 Strecker) preserves an invaluable piece of Eratosthenic scholarship. Indeed, the scholium – which seems to cite the Cyrenean philologist verbatim – reports both Eratosthenes’ and Chamaeleon’s opinion on the problem of the authorship of the hymn Παλλάδα περσέπολιν quoted in the verse of the Clouds. Besides showing the main characteristic of Eratosthenes’ philological method – which consists in the extensive use of intertextual comparison –, the fragment also shows a close connection with P.Oxy XIII 1611 (ll. 158-176) and therefore gives the chance to discuss both texts under a critic point of view. In actual fact, despite the numerous studies already published on the topic, none of the solutions given so far seems completely satisfying. In particular, the text of schol. Ar. Nu. 967b as printed by Holwerda can not be accepted. The paper introduces a new proposal of emendation.

This paper considers the emergence of French academic classicism in architecture alongside several legally sanctioned building practices in late 17th-century Paris, including newly regulated methods of funding, construction, and speculation. As opposed to the representational dictates of French Classicism, which granted intellectual authority to historical precedents and mathematical principles, these procedures tested, quantified, and gambled on architecture as a material reality. As a construction site, the Place des Victoires (1685-1694) by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, among others, proves a particular potent case study: Proposed and partially funded by the Duke of La Feuillade to house a royal sculpture by Martin Desjardins, the project involved a complex web of architects, sculptors, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs practicing throughout the speculatively developing quarter of the Butte St.-Roch. That the place royale – circular in form and ordered in its ensemble of details – was frequently subject to theoretical analysis proves its engagement with the classical model. This paper, therefore, examines the means by which the period’s regulated practices of construction and finance (a process that might best be described as “classicism-in-production”) continually interacted and intervened in the conceptualization and edification of classicism at the end of the Grand Siècle.

Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America: Panel “Renaissance Transformations of Antiquity VII: Allelopoietic Transformations of Roman battle scenes”

The Sala della Creazione is the main room of the palazzo Besta of Teglio. Neither the artist nor the exact date are known and, for those reasons, the cycle remained largely ignored by art historians. The decoration is based on the Old Testament, especially the Creation, and on astrological and cartographic maps. Regarding the iconography of the Creation and the cartographic production, the Sala della Creazione appears as a unicum which combines the imagination of the origins and the one of maps. This paper wants to trace the roots of such an invention, which is linked to a deep meditation on the role of man in the order of cosmos. The poetic way of the artist and the empirical way of the cosmographer are here combined in a common goal: expose, to the eye of the spectator, the history of the world, from the Creation to present times.

Lazzaro Bastiani distinguishes himself as one of the most interesting yet less considered fifteenth-century Venetian painters. Noted in San Lio since 1456, where he seems to have settled with his workshop, Lazzaro enjoyed widespread appreciation among his contemporaries, as demonstrated by the importance of commissions and documentary evidence. Nevertheless, scholarly focused on rival artistic families, such as those of Vivarini and Bellini, academics have not sufficiently stressed the importance of Bastiani’s course for the development of Venetian painting in the second half of the Quattrocento. This paper deals with a reexamination of the artist’s career from the seventh to the ninth decade of the fifteenth century, specifying some new aspects regarding style and chronology and discussing the relationship between some autographs pieces and bottega works, with particular attention to the reuse practice of the same cartoons for different oeuvres. As a result, archaisms and medieval legacy seem to confirm the workshop culture in which Bastiani’s painting arose.

Rhetoric and religious imagery were often coupled during the Renaissance: the first resorted to the second in order to move and excite the emotions of the public; and the image, for its part, benefited from the direction and commentary provided by sermons. Of the three aims of classical rhetoric, movere was the most sought after by orators and art theoreticians alike. Through this ‘emotive rhetoric’ (in Aby Warburg’s words) that appealed to the senses, the preacher interacted with altarpieces and individual images with the aim of provoking feelings, and some devotional texts taught the devout to compose mental images to the point of visualising themselves as witnesses. This proposal aims to underline the existence of this cross-breeding Hispanic-Italian theory of the sacred image, which can explain the mechanisms of the invention, control and reception of religious art in the Roman Catholic Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.