Colloque international : The Announcement. Annunciations and Beyond, KHI, Florence, 2-4 mai 2013

 Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut,
May 2 – 04, 2013

The Announcement. Annunciations and Beyond

An International Conference at the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, Via dei Servi 51, I-50122 Firenze

Organized by Hana Gründler, Itay Sapir and Alessandro Nova

The Annunciation is, first of all, a long tradition of representations of ‘the’ Annunciation, the one narrated in the Gospel of Lucas: a ‘caesura’ in which everything changed, but also the fragment of time in which this change was made known. An announcement of a birth to come, of course, but also of death, resurrection and redemption. Daniel Arasse established the essential link between the evolution of this tradition in Renaissance Italy – its most famous homeland – and the parallel conceptualization and practice of linear perspective. And indeed, Annunciations, thanks to their ubiquity in Early Modern art and their narrative simplicity (two protagonists, a message, a single domestic space) were, and still are, a formidable laboratory of formal and visual thinking.

This long series of representations is also the nodal point of several important philosophical issues that can be extended thematically, chronologically and geographically well beyond the literal, Christian theme of the Annunciation. Tracing the development of the Annunciation and the announcement is thus a useful way to narrate the changing views on numerous questions: the issue of ‘time’, first and foremost; the hardly conceivable simultaneity of the announcement, the acceptance, and its coming into effect; the fragment of time that is not anymore the ‘before’, but not yet the ‘after’; and the relation between a personal story and general History, with their different temporalities, here suddenly converging.

Then, there is the question of the Word, of its transformation into material fact; the relation between announcer – the long-standing figure of the messenger – and recipient of the message, their inevitable epistemological difference here complicated by their ontological alterity, not to mention the gender aspect; and the various degrees of expectation and readiness that condition the reception of the message and its subsequent comprehension.

Annunciations and announcements are therefore a conceptual archipelago worth discussion for art history, philosophy and politics in the early twenty-first century. Announcements – these sudden, often unexpected fulgurations that appear, in the midst of life, in our inboxes, at our doorsteps, even in our dreams – are a persistent phenomenon and an incessant challenge to the visual arts. It is thus the whole range of announcements – from the depictions of the angel’s speech to Mary to wholly secular artistic references to staggering political announcements, with any other visual treatment of the act of announcing in between, that the conference at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut will be dedicated.

Program

Thursday, 2 May 2013

14:00-14:30
Alessandro Nova
Welcome

Hana Gründler and Itay Sapir
Introduction

Duplications
Chair: Wolf-Dietrich Löhr

14:30-15:15
Maria Lidova (Pisa)
Incarnation revealed: The ‘Ustyug’ Icon and Annunciation Imagery in the
Middle Byzantine Art

15:15-16:00
Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck (Bonn)
Wort und Bild in der Widmungsminiatur des Kostbaren Evangeliars Bischof
Bernwards von Hildesheim

16:00-16:30    Break

Messengers
Chair: Itay Sapir

16:30-17:15
Lea Dovev (Ramat Gan)
In Excess: ‘musica angelica’, ‘musica humana’, and Enunciation in Fra
Angelico

17:15-18:00
Maya Corry (Oxford)
The Annunciating Angel in Leonardesque Devotional Painting

Evening Lecture
Introduction: Alessandro Nova

18:30-19:30
Mieke Bal (Amsterdam)
The Annunciation: The Moving Image as an Act of Witnessing

Friday, 3 May 2013

Third Parties – Figures and Things
Chair: Carolin Behrmann

09:30-10:15
Brigitte Roux (Geneva)
La parole observée: les figures de témoins dans les Annonciations
médiévales

10:15-11:00
Christopher P. Heuer (Princeton)
Speech as Object

11:00-11:30    Break

Spaces and Places
Chair: Brigitte Sölch

11:30-12:15
Alasdair Flint (York/London)
Access and Inaccessibility in Florentine Annunciations, 1430-1500

12:15-13:00
Marius Rimmele (Constance)
Verkündigungen auf Triptychonaußenseiten: Medienreflexion und
performative Inszenierung eines Mysteriums

13:00-14:30    Break

Appropriations and “Reincarnations”
Chair: Hannah Baader

14:30-15:15
Mattia Biffis (Venice)
Il dono del sapere. Sensi profani dell’annuncio in un ciclo veneziano
di metà Cinquecento

15:15-16:00
Marie Caillat (Rome)
Bedrooms of Saints and Blesseds. Research on the Annunciation as a
‘dispositif’

16:00-16:30    Break

Avant Première of Annonces
Introduction: Hana Gründler and Itay Sapir

16:30-18:30
Nurith Aviv (Paris)
Projection of the Film and Discussion

Saturday, 4 May 2013

Subversions and Counterparts
Chair: Hana Gründler

10:00-10:45
Sophie-Isabelle Dufour (Paris)
Mélancolie et divination d’Albrecht Dürer à Lars von Trier

10:45-11:30
Stefan Kristensen (Geneva)
Touching the Virgin. Jean-Luc Godard’s Subversion of the Sacred

Contact
Hana Gründler
gruendler@khi.fi.it

Mandy Richter
richter@khi.fi.it

Source: H-ArtHist

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