Global Dialogues. The Italian Renaissance as Seen from Latin America

Organization committee: Carmen Fernández-Salvador (Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador), Maria Berbara (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Patricia Zalamea (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia).

With the collaboration of Villa I Tatti. The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut; Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

This symposium has two main goals: on the one hand, to encourage research in Latin America related to the ways in which the Italian Renaissance was assimilated and transformed in different parts of the world. This includes taking into consideration the exchange between Renaissance Italy and Colonial Latin America - or Africa and Asia - but it also suggests the notion of 'an Italian Renaissance as seen from Latin America'. As a consequence, this symposium is also focused on how research on the Italian Renaissance is being undertaken from a Latin American perspective. The second goal of this symposium is to constitute a sustainable Latin American network of scholars who work on the Renaissance. The present symposium is meant to foster debates, exchanges and feedback by offering keynote talks and papers on recent research, as well as student presentations.

Historians and art historians have often reminded us that globalization is not a contemporary phenomenon, and that the establishment of strong transnational (artistic) connections happened in many other historical moments. The Italian Renaissance coincided historically with the global maritime voyages that so drastically enlarged both geographical and cultural horizons of Europeans and non-Europeans, opening up a new age of globalization. In this way, the language of Italian Renaissance art was exported, transformed and even collected throughout the world. Whereas studies in Italian Renaissance art have often tried to detect what were considered to be specific regional characteristics, this seminar will deal with the ways in which the Italian Renaissance was absorbed, translated and reconceptualized in different parts of the globe.

The notion of a "global dialogue" deals with commercial and cultural exchange, as well as with connections and parallels between artistic expressions that can be found in cities as distant from one another as for example Tunja, Manila, Acapulco, Seville, Lisbon or Nuremberg. Rethinking the Italian Renaissance in terms of its global reach opens the field to broader debates including concepts such as colonialism and capitalism. Comparative studies and research on the migration of images and books, cultural exchange, patronage, and epistolography point to the reciprocal nature of the ongoing dialogue -or confrontation- between the so-called Old and New world. Special attention will be paid to travels of Italian artists to Viceregal Latin America; the incorporation and translation of certain Italian Renaissance styles into new contexts; the use of architectural models and treatises for Colonial buildings; collecting practices and the circulation of Italian books and images as well as of Non-Western objects; the ways in which a historiography of Latin American Colonial art was constructed based on Vasari and other Italian Renaissance authors; as well as more theoretical issues involving translation, hybridization and idolatry.