Workshop
Marking Completion: The Status and Circulation of Drawings from the 15th Century to Today
International Workshop organized by the Lise Meitner Group "Coded Objects" at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute and the Medici Archive Project.
Organizers: Karina Pawlow (Saarland University / KHI) and Rebecca I. Arnheim (Tel Aviv University).
Disegno di Claudio Capotondi. Museo Galileo, Firenze.
When is a drawing complete, independent, or “finished?” Is the concept of completion a conscious decision made by the artist, or something that happens later, in the hands of collectors, dealers, curators, or algorithms? The aim of this workshop is to investigate when and whether drawings were considered “finished” and how that sense of completion is frustrated as drawings move between contexts from the fifteenth century to today. The workshop treats drawings as independent objects that circulate and accrue economic and emotional value, and generate knowledge across art, science, design, and technology. Thus, drawings are understood here as sites of ongoing inquiry, experimentation, and reasoning, capable of generating unique forms of knowledge, visualization, and conceptual connection. Developed in dialogue with the research trajectories of the Medici Archive Project and the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” and their focus on processual and methodological approaches, this workshop treats “completion” not as a final state, but as a series of active thresholds. This workshop intends to focus on those moments when a drawing is judged, classified, circulated, or stabilized. The papers address how drawings shift status as they move between studios, museums, archives, markets, and digital platforms from the 1400s to today. How and when do drawings exceed their initial roles as studies, models, technical records, or designs to be treated as finished works or circulating images in their own right? What forms of knowledge, agency, gaps, new connections or authorship do drawings perform when disentangled from the artistic, technical, or scientific processes they were meant to support or contexts they emerged from? How do these shifting roles reshape the criteria by which a drawing is recognized as “complete,” or even as a drawing?
Program
Tuesday, 22 September (MAP)
Location: Medici Archive Project, Palazzo Alberti, Via de’ Benci 10, 50122 Florence
9:30 am – Welcome
Alessio Assonitis, Medici Archive Project
9:40 am – Introduction
Rebecca Arnheim, Tel Aviv University, & Karina Pawlow, Saarland University/ KHI
10:00 am
1: The Authorizing Mark: Annotation, Contract, and the Declared Finish
Mário Linhares, Universidade de Lisboa
“Correct” and “Fix”: George Chinnery’s Shorthand Annotations on Finished and Unfinished Drawings
Leïla Thomas, University of Geneva
The Temporary Completion of a Modello by Francesco Salviati
Eric Boot, Rijksmuseum
Reconsidering the Creative Genesis and Reception of Michelangelo’s teste divine
Discussion
11:30 am – Coffee Break
11:45 pm
2: The Album as Apparatus: Binding, Editing, and the Assembled Whole
Neilabh Sinha, Leiden University
Drawing on Dynastic Pasts: Drawings as Trophies and Instructional Tools in Timurid and Habsburg Albums
Giovanni Santucci, University of Pisa
Material Editing and Completion in the Talman Collection
Licia Bianchi, Tre University and Universitat Pompeu Fabra
When Detail Becomes Knowledge: Drawing, Observation and Visual Taxonomies across Antiquarianism and Jesuit Encyclopedism
Discussion
1:15 pm – Lunch Break
2:15 pm
3: The Operative Drawing: Types, Blueprints, and Production Systems
Olha Tikhonova, Palladio Museum
When Drawings Become Finished Types: Peruzzi, Serlio, Perret and the Fortified Palace
Emine Esra Nalbant, Binghamton University
Circulating Images, Moving Parts: Lighthouses of the Southern Red Sea and Their Installation
Christopher Williams-Wynn, Freie Universität Berlin
Recursive Production: The Cybernetic Operations of Drawing in Buenos Aires, c. 1968
Discussion
Coffee Break
4:00 pm
4: Unsettled States: Materiality, Circulation, and Productive Incompletion
Laura Nica, University of Westminster
Hyperdimensional Plasticity: Re-encountering Digital Materiality in Zaha Hadid’s Phaeno Science Centre
Amanda Caterina Leong, Getty Project Mongol Connections
Drawing (Male) Anxiety: “Unfinished” Female Alterity in the Diez Albums
Filippo Bosco, ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry
The Project and the Fragment: The Status of Drawing and Its Transnational Circulation in the Italian 1970s
Discussion
Wednesday, 23 September (Museo Galileo & KHI)
Morning location: Museo Galileo, Piazza dei Giudici, 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italien
Afternoon location: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Palazzo Grifoni, Via dei Servi 51, 50122 Firenze
10:00 am – Consultation of drawings at the Museo Galileo Library, followed by a visit to the collections
For speakers and organizers only
12:00 pm – Individual time at the Museo Galileo
1:00 pm – Individual Lunch
2:00 pm – Welcome (at Palazzo Grifoni)
Anna-Maria Meister, KHI/ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
2:15 pm
5: After the Occasion: Survival, Reclassification, and the Documentary Afterlife
Geronimo Cristobal, Cornell University
The Finished Modello: Stradanus’s Conquest of the Philippine Islands after Philip II’s Obsequies
Olga Konyukova, Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
Temple Bar in Motion: Gordon Cullen’s Drawings between Project, Publication, and Archive
Deva Gladia Chrastina, Charles University in Prague
A Drawing by Boccaccio Boccaccino from Nature Study to Preparatory Drawing
Discussion
3:45 pm – Coffee Break
4:00 pm
Marking Completion, Together: A Conversation
with Francesca Borgo, University of St Andrews/ Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte;
Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno di Firenze;
Andrea Bernardoni, University of L’Aquila/ Museo Galileo;
Morgan Ng, Yale University/ Villa I Tatti; and further participants.
Moderated by Karina Pawlow, Saarland University/ KHI & Rebecca Arnheim, Tel Aviv University
Location and Access
This two-day workshop will be hosted across three venues: on the first day at the Medici Archive Project (Palazzo Alberti), and on the second day at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai) with a visit to the drawing collection of the Museo Galileo, organized in collaboration with the museum.
On day 2, this event will be hybrid and take place in person at Palazzo Grifoni in Via dei Servi 51, Firenze. The building can be entered about half an hour before the event. Ring the bell at “Photothek” if the door is not open yet. The event space is located on the first floor, reachable with 3 steps of stairs at the entrance and a large stairway or elevator (with limitations for wheelchair users). The location can be accessed with a wheelchair via an alternative entrance from Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, but advance request is necessary. If you have any access needs, e.g. verbal descriptions or alternative seating, please let us know in advance via info@khi.fi.it, and we will try to accommodate those.
22 – 23 settembre 2026
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut
Via dei Servi 51
50122 Firenze
Medici Archive Project
via de’ Benci 10
50122 Florence
To attend the event in person no registration is necessary.
Information on how to participate online will be available soon.
Ulteriori informazioni
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