The Intelligent Hand,1500–1800

Sixth Early Modern Symposium

10.00 – 17.45, Saturday 8 November 2014
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

This one-day symposium will address the hand both as the means and the subject of
representation in Early Modern art and visual
culture. Traditionally held to be subordinate to the
creative drive of the mind, the artist's hand may
also be considered as an autonomous agent,
manifesting itself through individual style, the
manipulation of media or as an iconographic motif.
How did artists conceive the relation between
intellectual and manual labour? How was the
human hand represented in different contexts,
from scientific treatises to portraits and drawing
manuals? Papers will investigate the role of
drawing in artistic training, as well as the
representation of gesturing in complex pictorial
compositions.
A workshop with Linda Karshan, an artist whose
practice revolves around the exploration of the
process of drawing, will allow the participants to move beyond the early modern period and
examine the status of the hand in contemporary artistic practice.

Organised by Austėja Mackelaitė and Camilla Pietrabissa (The Courtauld Institute of Art).

Ticket/entry details: £16 (£11 students, Courtauld staff/students and concessions)

BOOK ONLINE: http://ci.tesseras.com/internet/shop Or send a cheque made payable to
‘The Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum,
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, stating ‘Sixth
Early Modern Symposium’.
For further information, email ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk.

PROGRAMME

09.30 – 10.00 Registration

10.00 – 10.15 Austėja Mackelaitė and Camilla Pietrabissa (The Courtauld Institute of Art):
Introduction

10.15 – 11.30 SESSION I

 Yannis Hadjinicolaou (Freie Universität Berlin / Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin): Thinking Hand, Painting Process and the Rembrandt Tradition

Carlton Hughes (University of South Carolina-Upstate):

Michelangelo’sConcetto

Anna Sgobbi (Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität, Munich): The Self-Portrait

of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1598): The Gymnosophist Artist and his
Way of Painting

11.30 – 12.00 Tea / Coffee Break (provided)

12.00 – 13.15 SESSION II

Nicolas Misery (Université Lumière Lyon 2 / Laboratoire de Recherche

Historique en Rhône Alpes (LARHRA)): Parmigianino’s
Prometheus Animating Man (ca. 1526 -1530): Gesturing the Poetics of
Artistic Creation in the Italian Sixteenth Century

Claudia Steinhardt-Hirsch (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich): The

Speaking Hand: The Act of Drawing in Early Modern Italy

Tamar Mayer (University of Chicago): Drawing Hands: Trace, Pressure and

Reversal in Jacques-Louis David’s Preparatory Practices

13.15 – 14.00 Lunch (not provided, except for speakers and chairs)

14.00 – 14.45 Linda Karshan: ‘I am after the most perfect line’. Two workshops with the
artist at the Prints and Drawings Study Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art.

14.45 – 16.00 SESSION III

Temenuzhka Dimova (Université de Strasbourg): Comput digitis: the

Arithmetic of Fingers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French
Painting

Johanna Scherer (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig):

Measuring Hands: Gestures in the Image of the Sixteenth-Century Artist

Jungyoon Yang (Universiteit van Amsterdam): Trusting Hands: Thedextrarum

iunctio in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Epithalamia

16.00 – 16.20 Break

16.20 – 17.45 SESSION IV

Catherine Hunt (University of Bristol): The Vicarious Hand, the Intelligent

Glove

Joaneath Spicer (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore): The Possessive Hand:

Gathering Intelligence, Experiencing Pleasure in the Renaissance

Nina Samuel (Berlin): Hand in Hand: Anatomical and Architectural Links to

Reconstructive Hand Surgery in Early Modern Art