“Wearing Images”: Special Issue of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma – Call For Papers

We invite all members of the academic community to submit original manuscripts for the sixth issue of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII. Historia del Arte, New Era. Submissions in English, Spanish and French are welcome for the themed dossier. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2017.

THEMED DOSSIER: “Wearing Images”
by Diane Bodart

“Wearing Images” is the title of the themed volume for the sixth issue of the journal that has recently entered a New Era. It will be guest-edited by Diane Bodart, David Rosand Assistant Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History at Columbia University of New York, who has proposed the following thematic framework for this special issue:

In the past decades, studies on the materiality and the efficacy of images, as well as the artistic and social practices related to them, have allowed scholars to explore how much images’ making, use, handling and display contributed to the activation of their powers of presence through their interaction with the viewer. Further, the growing interest in the articulation between the history of art and the anthropology of images has brought to light the close links between the art object and the body: in fact, if the body can be the medium of the animate art object, the art object can potentially act as a substitute of the animate body. But what happens when the body is not the medium but the support of a distinctive image, when it inscribes an image on its own surface, whether directly on the skin or through intermediary props such as clothing or corporeal parure?

Wearing Images aims to investigate the different modes of interaction between the image and the body that wears it in the Early-Modern period (between ca 1400-1800), when devotional, political, dynastic or familial images could be worn as medals, jewels, badges, embroidered garments or tattoos. During processions or public rituals, images could be carried in close contact with the body, as if they were part of it. Sometimes, the body could be entirely wrapped with images and transformed by them, for example through the adornment of armor or carnival costumes. The volume will address issues such as: the role of images worn on the body in the definition of identity, in the affirmation of group affiliation, and in the construction of the self; the apotropaic dimension and empowering effect created by the contact between the body and the image; the performativity of wearing images on the body in motion and the interaction that it engages between the image-bearer and the image-viewer. Attention will also be devoted to the depiction of the image-bearer, which introduces a potential structure en abyme into the pictorial composition through the inscription of an image within an image.

The volume Wearing images will consider original papers that investigate the act of inscribing and carrying images on the body in the Early-Modern period, through mediums such as tattoos, jewels, badges, garments, armor or shields. Contributions discussing the representation of images bearers in works of art are also encouraged. Papers can focus on a particular example or analyze a group of objects. There are no geographic restrictions for the volume, and while the chronology mainly concerns the Early-Modern period, comparative analyses with other periods are also welcome.

Please circulate this Call for Papers widely. Once you have registered and consulted the submission guidelines, please send your proposal on our online journal platform:

http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/ETFVII/index

http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/ETFVII/about/submissions

If you have any enquiries, please contact the journal editor, Inmaculada Vivas, serie7.revista-etf@geo.uned.es; for queries regarding the e-platform, contact Jesús López revista-etf@geo.uned.es