Panel at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting 2023

Save Venice Associate Organization paper panels at Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, all in-person, 9–11 March 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Save Venice’s recent conservation campaigns focusing on Carpaccio’s paintings for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola and the Scuola Dalmata, as well as on Veronese’s theatrical paintings in the Church of San Sebastiano and Tintoretto’s dramatic ceiling paintings in the Palazzo Ducale have called attention to Venetian approaches to (and changing tastes in) pictorial narrative.  

Whether painting history, legend, scripture, or classical myth, Venetian artists were masters of the art of storytelling. Their narrative modes changed over time from an eyewitness style that privileged detail and happenstance, akin to the chronicle, to poetic renderings of pastoral themes, based on the odes and idylls of Roman and Greek writers such as Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, to the dramatic presentation of subject matter drawn from history, mythology, and the Bible. This development often mirrored parallel changes in contemporary popular theatre and/or relief sculpture.

This session welcomes presentations on any aspect of pictorial narrative in Venice, from large format works in the Venetian scuole, churches, and public buildings, to small-scale scenes on predellas, furniture, and sculptural reliefs.

Please send your full name, current affiliation, paper title (15-word maximum), abstract (150-word maximum), PhD completion date (past or expected), keywords, and a 1-page non-narrative curriculum vitae to the organizers, Sarah Blake McHam ([email protected]) and Patricia Fortini Brown ([email protected]). Submission deadline is August 1, 2022.