Proposal deadline extended:
College Art Association
Chicago, February 12-15, 2020
Long understudied in early modern Northern art and visual culture, the male nude is attracting new kinds of scholarly attention. Theories of embodiment and performance, and the rise of masculinity studies, have all contributed to broadening the previous focus on issues particular to female nude in Northern art. Recent scholarship has focused on how the Northern male nude constructs notions of virtue, classical stability, pastoral beauty, and pathos across a range of media and functions including prints and drawings, drawing books, portraiture, history painting, and the emerging genre of male bathers. Such new inquiry demonstrates a diversity of animating questions and interpretive methods for considering how the male nude produced significance for various audiences in the Netherlands. This panel aims to reassess the male nude in relation to artistic production and reception; early modern humanist, natural, and material knowledge; and classed systems of status and power, fashion and body ideals.
Papers can address issues including but not limited to: representing the body in studio pedagogy and practices; the represented male body as a medium of scientific knowledge; dress and contemporary practices of personal grooming; early modern debates about nudity and morality in art; the collecting and display of male nude figures in aspirational portraiture and classical allegories; the male nude as the site of identification and/or disavowal for the male artist; the social, political and religious semiotics of the male nude male reassessed by gender and sexuality studies; the male nude shaped by the cross-cultural dynamics of the global Netherlands.
Field of Study:
Northern Europe
Western and Central Europe
Early Modern (1450-1800)
Seventeenth Century
Sixteenth Century
Chairs: Martha Hollander, Hofstra University – martha.hollander@hofstra.edu and Lisa Rosenthal, Univ. Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – lrosenth@illinois.edu
Proposals, due via email to the session chairs no later than Aug. 12, 2019, must include CAA’s proposal form (which asks for a brief statement and a 250-word abstract) and a short-form CV. For the proposal form and complete submission instructions, see here.