Program of AIWAC 2022

Discover the full program of the event
Day 1
19 Oct 2022

Opening Remarks

Francesco Bedeschi Resident Director UARK Rome Program Consuelo Lollobrigida Convenor of AIWAC Faculty of Art History University of Arkansas Rome Program Adelina Modesti Convenor of AIWAC Honorary Senior Fellow in...
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Jirki Thibaut
Adelina Modesti
Adelina Modesti
Consuelo Lollobrigida
Consuelo Lollobrigida
Francesco Bedeschi
Francesco Bedeschi

MORNING SESSION – A Gendered Nature

Adelina Modesti, chair – Rebecca M. Gregg, executive organization

The «lux vivens» and Hildegard’s new senses: tools for knowledge of God and nature

During her visions, and particularly when she is visited by the «lux vivens», Hildegard experiences a transformation of her sense organs, which no longer distinguish between sensations, but perceive them...
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Teodoro de Giorgio
Teodoro De Giorgio

Why Have There Been So Many Women Pioneers in Still-Life?

Still-life painting might seem to epitomize a connection between women artists and naturalism. Certainly, Western European women were pioneers in the genre of what later came to be known as...
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Patricia Simons

A gendered nature: women and naturalism in early modern Bologna

Naturalism and the portrayal of the natural world as a meta for Renaissance painting is often discussed regarding male artists such as Leonardo, but less so for women artists. Ironically,...
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Patricia Rocco
Patricia Rocco
11:15-11:45

MORNING COFFEE BREAK DAY 1

“I hear too much, I see too much, and I notice everything”: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, an Artist’s Ailment

Florence, 1792: during her trip to Italy the French painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun finds herself for the second time in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During her stay, she...
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Stefania Biancani
Stefania Biancani

Unearthing colonialism: botanic criticism in the work of Jenny Yurshansky

Unearthing colonialism: botanic criticism in the work of Jenny Yurshansky. This paper will focus on the work that American artist Jenny Yurshansky has developed since 2012 around the classification of...
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Haizea Barcenilla
Haizea Barcenilla

Women-founders of Prague Loreto in the context of iconographic motive miraculous Nativity according to St. Bridget of Sweden

Pilgrim place Loreto is situated in the middle of Prague district Hradčany, therefore in one of the most prominent parts of Prague. There we can find Prague Castle, an old...
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Marie Vymazalova
Marie Vymazalova

AFTERNOON SESSION – Still Life

Consuelo Lollobrigida, chair – Mary D. Reynolds, executive organization

The Illustration of Nature as a Collaborative Enterprise: Examining the Artistic Practices of Maria Sibylla Merian and the Women Artists in her Network

The collaborative nature of early modern natural science has been well established. As Brian Ogilvie noted, the development of botanical knowledge, amongst other areas of focus, “could be the product...
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Catherine Powell Warren
Catherine Powell-Warren
16:30-17:00

AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK DAY 1

On Being Planted and Portrayed: Horticulture and Floral Imagery in Seicento Rome through the works of Anna Maria Vaiani

In the early seventeenth century, Roman nobles prized flowers for their exoticism and beauty. They constructed decorative gardens, collected rare and exotic plants, and commissioned paintings of flowers in vases...
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Clio Rom
Clio Rom
19:00

DINNER AT HILDEGARD’S TABLE

Day 2
20 Oct 2022

MORNING SESSION – Botanical Studies and History of Naturalism

Consuelo Lollobrigida, chair – Mary D. Reynolds, executive organization

Properzia de’ Rossi schultora e la natura: una relazione di valori

Properzia de’ Rossi lived in 16th-century Bologna: first schultora in history of art, she took part in the construction of the main basilica in the city (San Petronio) where she...
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Simona Trifogli
Simona Trifogli

Elizabeth Gould, “The Queen of All Naturalists”

My paper focuses on Elizabeth Gould (1804-1841), an important but largely overshadowed figure in nineteenth century ornithology. Elizabeth, in partnership with her husband John Gould, became a pioneering and productive...
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Leah Tharpe

On Women and Colour: Catherine Perrot and the Practical Guides to Art-Making by Early Modern Women Artists

When in 1686 Catherine Perrot (d. 1690) published a treatise on the art of painting in miniature, she became one of the only known women in the early modern period...
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Tori Champion
11:15-11:45

MORNING COFFEE BREAK DAY 2

A Lifetime’s Work: Mary Delany and Her Paper Garden

The rooms of the British Museum in London host, among countless other treasures, the so-called “Flora Delanica”, one of the most surprising herbariums of the eighteenth century. Work of Mary...
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Alessia Muroni Ramus
Alessia Muroni Ramus

“Uccellami e Fiorami” for History and Poetry in Grand Ducal Florence. The naturalistic drawings of Suor Maria Benigna Cavalcanti (Convent of Le Murate) and Suor Caterina Angelica della Vacchia (Convent of St. Chiara)

The interest in nature—expressed through artistic gardens and works of art with botanical and zoological subjects—widespread in grand ducal Florence, had a reflection in some conventual chronicles and poetical collections....
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Loretta Vandi
Loretta Vandi

The Repudiation of Originality & the Embrace of Vegetality in the Botanical Artwork of Henrietta Maria Moriarty

From the paintings of exquisite floral arrangements by Rachel Ruysch to the meticulous documentation of entomological subjects in their tropical milieu by Maria Sibylla Merian, early modern women depicted the...
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Katie Sagal

From The Kimberley to Cape York: The emergence of flora in the art of female artists working in remote First Nations communities in Australia

This paper will examine the place occupied by native flora in representations of country in the work of First Nations female painters. The paper will focus in particular on women...
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Jeanette Hoorn
Jeanette Hoorn

Reflected illustrations of knowledge instead of lifeless flowers – some remarks on still life female artists

Female artists of the 18th century often paint (only) still lifes – and thus produce works in a genre that is still regarded today as a inferior in the canon...
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Martina Sitt

Eleonora di Toledo and the Creation of the Boboli Gardens

Eleonora di Toledo was associated with fertility themes and ancient harvest goddesses throughout her reign as second duchess of Florence. These associations were based on both her personal fecundity, as...
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Bruce Edelstein
Bruce Edelstein

AFTERNOON SESSION – Domesticities and Entrepreneurship

Adelina Modesti, chair – Kirsten B. Larson, executive organization

The Rise of Household Manuals and Early Modern Dutch Dollhouse: The Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Home as Laboratory and Site of Knowledge Production

The Netherlands witnessed a distinct rise in the publication of a variety of household manuals and guides in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century, presaged by early cookbooks and conduct guides as harbingers...
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Michelle Moseley
16:30-17:00

AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK DAY 2

Neroli, the essence of Princess des Ursins’ legacy: the blooming of a legend

When the Princesse des Ursins (1642-1722), née Marie-Anne de la Trémoille, entered the Roman aristocracy after marrying the Duke of Bracciano and Prince of Neroli (Flavio Orsini) in 1675, she...
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Alba Carballeira

Madonna of the Svezzamento

Madonna of the Svezzamento (attributed here to Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1611, Palazzo Barberini Corsini) has been one among many of the depictions of the Madonna and Child in early seventeenth...
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Margaret Greta Barnes
Margaret (Greta) Barnes

Modern Madonnas. The Image of Motherhood as Depicted by Hungarian Female Painters in Interwar Art

In 1931, fifteen female painters decided to form a modern artists’ group called the New Group of Women Artists. To mark the occasion, an exhibition was held at the National...
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Anna Kopócsy
Day 3
21 Oct 2022

MORNING SESSION – Folly and Hysteria

Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi, chair – Chantal A. Celis, executive organization

Woman… the transformation of an archetype from witch to fatal Woman, crossing feminism at the beginning of the twentieth century

The archetype is none other than creations of the human unconscious, in which fears, hopes and feelings are expressed that can be shared by all. We rarely ask ourselves how...
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Laura Sardone
Laura Sardone

Fools, witches, and hysterics

Beginning from the title of the chosen section “Hysteria, Folly and Witchcraft”, the author at first intends to suggest a substantial distinction: the one between Madwomen on one hand and...
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Giovanni del Missier
Giovanni del Missier

Folly and witchcraft in anthropological studies

In the context of the 2022 AIWAC “Women’s Legacies in Natural Studies, Health, and Liberal Arts” focused on the correlation between women and naturalism from ancient times to contemporaneity I...
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Veronica Parise
Veronica Parise
11:15-11:45

MORNING COFFEE BREAK DAY 3

Stung by oistros, the divine goad: Female bodies in motion from hysterical dancing to art performance

What relationship may exist between female body movement and that concept of hysteria that has been analyzed in its various aspects in the previous papers? Before getting to the heart...
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Luana Testa
Luana Testa
Laura D'Angelo
Laura D’Angelo

Francesca Alinovi, critique as performance: a source for art history

Francesca Alinovi, in search of the engines of her critical action: performance, dada, comics, graffiti. A short reading of an art historian inserted in the Academy that became an exponent...
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Francesca Valentini
Francesca Valentini

Josefa de Ayala D’Obidos’s Physical and Spiritual Realms of Nature: Flora and Fauna Symbolism

The writings of Barbara von Barghahm, Luis de Moura Sobral, and Victor Serrão bring new insight into Obidos’s artistic career and accomplishments, demonstrating her celebrity status during the seventeen and...
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Liana Cheney

AFTERNOON SESSION – A Gaze Over Contemporaneity

Laura D’Angelo, chair – Addison P. Stahler, executive organization

Unseen Modernities: Re-imagining the Visionary “Real” in the Art of Marianne Stokes, 1900-1910s

The art of the Austrian-born Marianne Stokes (née Preindlsberger; 1855–1927) remains extraordinarily neglected by scholars of modern art and visual culture. As with so many artistic partnerships, her distinctive contributions to...
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Juliet Simpson

Sneaky Peeks: Women in the Bedroom

In the 1960 neorealist masterpiece Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers) by filmmaker Luchino Visconti, the domestic environment and its features symbolize and represent several interwoven actors:...
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Lara Demori
Lara Demori

A marriage between nature and architecture: feminine biophilic

There is an innate connection between nature and human beings, a relationship lost in the mists of time. Nature is all around us, but our contemporary urban lives are confined...
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Francesca Riccardo
Francesca Riccardo
16:30-17:00

AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK DAY 3

Will a Woman Transform the World through Art and Medicine? Alice Walton circa 2005-2031 and beyond

I first saw Alice Walton in May 2012 when she received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Arkansas. She arrived from her Texas ranch where she raised, trained,...
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Fran Hangstrom
Fran Hagstrom