Exhibiting art objects has certainly increased over the past decades.  There are more and more large scale exhibitions, some of which able to  attract masses of people. What is the driving force behind this  multitude of exhibitions? Does Renaissance, once a classical topic,  still play a significant role? In order to understand the outreach of  the Renaissance in public view, we would like to have insides on how  museums are dealing with their Renaissance departments. A museum is  seldom build of objects just of one single period, but collections and  their curators are competing over permanent exhibition space and  temporary exhibitions.

We would like to invite papers with reflections on the value of Renaissance objects in the perception of museum strategies, competing collections, possibilities of exhibition, etc. The value and perception  of the collection might vary because the museum strategy values the Renaissance highly, because the curator is a successful promoter, because the civic surroundings are especially open to Renaissance topics, because the permanent collection already contains widely known Renaissance objects, or because the exhibition projects focus on topics which attract a mass of people.

A thematic issue on “Exhibiting the Renaissance” is projected with the open access online journal Kunsttexte (www.kunsttexte.de) for the first half of 2015. We invite papers (in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish) for a deadline in October 2014. Please feel free to contact the editors of the section Renaissance with any questions.

Send your proposals to both editors of Kunsttexte (Sektion Renaissance)

  • Angela Dressen (adressen [at] itatti.harvard.edu)
  • Susanne Gramatzki (gramatz [at] uni-wuppertal.de)