Scientific Management: Prof. Dr. Matthias Müller (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) Prof. Dr. Ulrich Pfisterer (Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München), Dr. Elke Anna Werner (Freie Universität Berlin)
Conference languages: German and English
Applications for a lecture with an abstract of max. 3,000 characters can be sent until April 30 2017 to the following address: Prof. Dr. Matthias Müller, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Institut für Kunstgeschichte und Musikwissenschaft Abteilung Kunstgeschichte Georg-Forster-Gebäude Jakob-Welder-Weg 12, 55128 Mainz, Email: mattmuel@uni-mainz.de
Conference Concept
What meanings do head and body convey in the medieval and early modern ruler portrait? How do its mimetic schemes and visual projections of power relate to each other? How are conceptually abstract norms and values of rulership transposed to categories of looking, how do images of bodies concretize these norms and values, and what modes of representation do they cultivate? Research on the history of portraits has relegated these questions to the margins; we presently lack a systematic analysis. Nevertheless, head and body forged central attributes and categories for physical manifestations of rulership in the Middle Ages and early modern period. The specific conditions of their visual portrayal is therefore of particular interest. Unlike in republican or democratic political systems, where the presence and legitimation of ruling power is supported by an elected government or a constitution, in principalities and monarchies the prince or king himself guaranteed the legitimacy of his own rule. He did this above all else through his physical body, whose visually and haptically experienced presence first lent the necessary evidence for his sovereignty.
Then again the body of the prince or king represented only the apex of a larger familial group, whose dynastic body likewise possessed a centuries-old genealogical dimension. The fundamentally non-republican and non-democratic nature of manifestations of rule shaped how the medium of portraiture represented the ruler’s body. Ruler portraiture had, on the one hand, to model Plato and Laktanz’s ideal corporeality of sovreignly virtue, and on the other hand—via reference to the genealogical-dynastic body—to visualize the concrete corporeality of a physically strong regent. The two imperatives sometimes intersected, stirring tension and conflict. Inherited, culturally determined, and semantically connoted modes of representation clashed with changing art-theoretical and technical norms. This is particularly visible in the new paradigms of mimesis that developed in Italy, France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the late Middle Ages and proliferated across Europe during the sixteenth century. Exemplary cases include the famous likeness of Jean le Bon in the Louvre, Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltre Diptych, Bernhard Strigel’s portraits for Emperor Maximilian I, Hans Holbein the Younger’s likeness of Henry VIII of England, or François Clouet’s images of the French King Francis I.
These portraits show a notable discrepancy between head and body, a disparity that arises from diverging modes of visualization and representation as well as different concepts of mimesis.
Mimetic divergence and heterogeneity only increase when the presence of the princely body is underscored through emphasis on the materiality of clothing and accessories, while the head remains subordinated to abstract typologizing. Such perspicuous hybridizations grow particularly pronounced when the ruler portrait is produced by a European artist but commissioned by a non-European regent. An informative example of this phenomenon is Gentile Bellini’s portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, painted in 1480 (London, National Gallery). Such likenesses, which also include early modern portraits of Chinese emperors inspired by European models, allow us to discuss the manifold facets of reciprocal processes of artistic and cultural transfer and transformation between European and non-European ruler portraits. Representations of female rulers, princes, and lower nobility boast an even greater variety of idiosyncratic concepts of power, mimesis, and evidence, as in the exceptional, non-genealogical case of the head and body of the Pope or Bishop.
Herein lies the challenge of the conference: it should comprehensively thematize the different normative, material, medial, functional, and aesthetic aspects of the corporeal and material presence of rulership in painted and printed ruler portraits from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Crucial to this endeavor is the question of how the relationship between the natural, political, and often sacral body of the ruler is handled in different political and social contexts and relations, in a medium that performs its own specific material presence and forms of evidentiary persuasion. The period under consideration ranges from the beginning of mimetically-oriented ruler portraiture as an autonomous category of representation in the late Middle Ages to the end of the Ancien Régime in France, where the execution of Louis XVI also marked a caesura in the treatment of the kingly body as a pictorial subject. Although portraiture in European countries and territories stands at the center of this investigation, it is nevertheless an object of the conference to compare European with non-European concepts of portraiture, and thereby reveal commonalities and differences as well as mechanisms of cultural transfer between European and non-European ruler portraiture.
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This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
https://grham.hypotheses.org/3931