Words for theory, words for practice: Forms, Uses, Issues in Early Modern artistic Lexicography

In the prospect of the circulation of concepts and practices and the permeability of artistic boundaries, the project LexArt – Words of art: the Rise of a terminology (1600-1750) which began in April 2013, studies the development of artistic vocabulary in the seventeenth-century, beginning with the Italian vocabulary of the great foundational texts, and how it transforms in the first part of the eighteenth-century among North European theorists in relation with artistic practices in France, Germany, England and the Netherlands. Words are agents in the circulation of concepts, and turn out to be a significant site of experimentation, dissemination, transfers and networks across artistic communities in early modern Europe.

Though the chronological and geographical boundaries, as well as the scope of the LexArt project itself are defined precisely, the purpose of this symposium is the necessary confrontation with other patterns from a methodological and conceptual perspective, and the extending of precise themes in order to provide a theoretical as well as concrete framework for the tools being developed by the LexArt project, namely the database (web application with interface under development), and the Encyclopedic Dictionary of artistic Terminology (in preparation) which are both based on publication of specific and targeted sources.

This symposium proposes various directions and fields of research through interdisciplinary and related approaches, to better grasp and define the forms, uses and issues of early modern artistic theory.

  1. Books on art: This interdisciplinary session examines the book as object in the broadest possible sense: from the publication of a book to its dissemination and its audiences, but also its composition (index, glossaries, table of contents). It may also consider the place and role of illustrations in texts on art, the complementarity or discrepancy between illustrations and text, the use and revival of models, as well as the confrontation between literary and visual descriptions of the work of art.
  2. Languages: the book as lexical laboratory: To provide a more comprehensive account of the issues at stake, this session considers topics that lie beyond the geographical and chronological scope of the LexArt Project. Different approaches may be imagined from examples found in historical lexicography from Baldinucci to the Encyclopédie méthodique: the mutation of lexical models from classical antiquity or from foundational Italian texts in early modern Europe; the vocabulary of theoretical texts versus that of artistic biographies; poetical language in the theory of art: words and the idiom of an artistic theory.
  3. Words and practices: from the studio to the Academy: This session addresses the rapport between theory and practice, and more specifically the transfer of knowledge through the words used in texts on art. It will explore the connections and differences between the appearance of a word and its practice as well as more generally the question of jargon or the relation between words and artistic professions.
  4. Translating words: The session approaches artistic lexicography by looking at strategies and process of transfers in textual translations from the early modern era. As well as focusing on networks, it may examine the use of multilingualism in historical lexicography, the notion of transfer as an element of conciliation or differentiation, or even leading to loss of meaning, and more generally on the life of European transfer networks between vivification, transformation, forgotten or abandonment, or the role of the translator as creator of words.
  5. Workshop (or round table discussion): Questions, themes and perspectives: This session welcomes contributions that focus on methods of research or more general issues of methodology related to the construction of databases or other web-based instruments.
  • The publication of illustrations: selection and indexation of images in databases.
  • Cartography, the atlas of words, and the dictionary: the genealogy and typology of words and their topography, the transfer of words from a text to a figured word in an atlas.
  • Paradigms of research and interactivity in databases: computerization, digitalization, navigation.
  • Questions and perspectives: using concrete examples to think about the use of computer systems for the study of artistic lexicography according to different objects (whether monographic or transversal) but also to raise questions about use and misuse of these new tools.

Submission modalities:

  • abstracts for papers should be no longer than 400 or 500 words max, and be headed by a title
  • they can be in either French or English
  • they should be complemented by a CV
  • each proposal will be examined by the Scientific Committee of LexArt

Proposals should be sent to these two addresses:

  • camicheleroline.heck[at]univ-montp3.fr
  • marianne.freyssinet[at]univ-montp3.fr