2025 Lovis Corinth Colloquium XIV Art History Department, Emory University
Thursday – Saturday, September 25th – 27th, 2025
‘Mundus Chartaceus: Paper, Virtual Presence, and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700’
Co-organizers: Sarah McPhee and Walter S. Melion
ca. 1551
(fabricated at the Benedictine monastery of Sint-Truiden).
The colloquium examines various aspects of paper culture in early modern Europe, focusing above all on the ways paper could function as a notional place, a hypothetical or fictional locus for the construction of alternative lives or worlds. Paper’s mediating functions and the ways in which it was used to produce various kinds and degrees of virtual presence, serving as a ground for the situational places, persons, and/or things drawn or impressed upon the sheet are central topics. How were paper’s material properties implicated in the production of circumstantial pictorial effects of time, space, and personhood? What were paper’s main figurative possibilities, that is, what were the chief similes and metaphors to which it gave rise? How did paper’s method of manufacture, its pliancy and portability, and the ease with which it could be cut, incised, dyed, marked, stamped, impressed, or imprinted determine how it was described and appreciated, construed and collected?
For the full program of the symposium, click here.