New York, March 27 - 29, 2014
Deadline: May 24, 2013

Reexamining the Early Modern Ornament Print (RSA 2014)

The large and varied corpus of works that fall under the rubric of
“ornament prints”, “Ornamentstiche” or “Ornamentale
Vorlageblätter” have been variously catalogued and recorded since the early nineteenth century. These important studies give us a general overview of when
and where the prints were made, the artists who made them and their
probable functions. Many critical questions remain, however, not least
the fundamental problem of what constitutes the genre itself. Rudolf
Berliner’s notion of the ornament print as a template, for example, has
proven to be overly one-dimensional and not representative of historic
practice. Is it possible to define or formulate specific parameters for
the genre as a whole? This session invites papers that take a wide
view on the theme of non-architectural ornament prints from the
fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Questions and topics to be
considered could include:

• what is an ornament print?

• the origins of the genre

• the imagery of ornament prints

• the relationship of ornament prints to the other arts

• the creators of ornament prints, e.g. the goldsmith-printmaker

• the purpose and utility (or lack thereof) of ornament prints

• early collectors of ornament prints

• copying versus ownership of design

Call for papers: http://www.rsa.org/?page=2014NewYork