International Round Table on Polychromy in Ancient Sculpture and Architecture

Conference - Colour Matters: Exploring Colour and Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914), Trinity College, Oxford.

6th -8th December, 2023.

This major international event was part of the ERC-funded CHROMOTOPE project (2019-2024), which analysed the artistic and literary impact of the invention of the first aniline dyes across Europe. It was scheduled to coincide with the exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design’ (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 21 September 2023 – 18 February 2024), which will showed how the chromatic innovations of the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the arts and culture of Britain and its Empire.

For more information about this conference, please visit:

https://chromotope.eu/colour-matters-2023/

Pigments, Colors and Ideas - International Symposium and Exhibitions, Bilkent University, Ankara

23rd and 24th November, 2023.

On the Occasion of 100th year of the Turkish Republic, the Faculty of Humanities and Letters and the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Bilkent University, organised a symposium and exhibitions inspired by the pigment, miltos sinopensis, the “red earth of Sinope”, a multi-purpose pigment which was in fact extracted from quarries in Cappadocia and traded from the harbour of Sinope.

The inaugural lecture of the Symposium and the first exhibition was held on the 23rd November in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The Symposium was held on the 24th November in Bilkent University and wasfollowed by the opening of second exhibition in the FADA Art Gallery of the University.

For the program, see the webpage of the event: pci.bilkent.edu.tr

Dyes in History and Archeology 42 - Copenhagen, Denmark.

31st October - 3rd November, 2023.

Dyes in History and Archeology (DHA) is an international expert group for colour and organic pigments in cultural heritage contexts that holds a conference every year with participants from all over the world.

The 42nd annual meeting was hosted by the University of Copenhagen. The conference was organized by the National Museum of Denmark, the Centre for Textile Research (CTR), the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and the Danish School of Conservation.

More information here.

"Polychromy in Practice: Casting Colour onto Roman Artwork" - Session #30 at EAA Belfast 2023.

30th August - 2nd September, 2023.

Organisers:

Louisa Campbell (United Kingdom), University of Glasgow

Gabrielle Kremer (Austria), Austrian Archaeological Institute

This session explored how new interpretive frameworks and the application of emerging techniques on Roman statuary, sculpted reliefs, inscriptions, artefacts and architectural features have altered their perception and facilitated their authentic reconstruction using cutting-edge digital technologies. Contributions were welcomed from researchers considering all aspects of polychromy practice in Roman contexts, including those with a focus on frontier contexts where the dynamics between cultural traditions, artistic skills, raw materials and availability of pigments may differ greatly from other provincial settings.

Further details of the session can be found here.

Conference - VI Colloquio AIRPA: Pictura Parietum. Mediterranean Connections in The Hellenistic And Roman Age, Agrigento, Sicily.

6th - 8th July, 2023.

The VI Colloquium took place in Agrigento, at the "Pietro Griffo" Archaeological Museum, inside the "Valle dei Templi" Archaeological and Landscape Park, and proposed for the reflection of the participants an important aspect of current research on the themes of ancient painting: the need to also include wall painting in a broader context, which embraces the entire Mediterranean basin.

More information here.

Conference - "A Natural History of Gems. Contexts and Materials of Pliny the Elder's Book 37", University of Pisa, Italy.

8th - 9th June, 2023.

As part of the celebrations for the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Pliny the Elder, the Palazzo "La Sapienza" hosted a 2-day conference on the context and themes of book 37 of the Naturalis Historia, dedicated to mineralogy. The interventions addressed aspects related to the sources of Pliny the Elder, mineralogy in the Greco-Roman world, the function and decoration of gems, the organization of the text and its philosophical perspectives.

More information on the programme here.

Chroma Symposium - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

24th - 25th March, 2023.

The Chroma symposium took place in The Met's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with presentations from a multi-disciplinary and international group of scholars, including art historians, conservators, curators, imaging specialists, and scientists.

The symposium sessions generally followed the overarching themes of the exhibition Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (July 5, 2022-March 26, 2023), which was co-curated by Seán Hemingway, John A. and Carole O. Moran Curator in Charge, and Associate Curator Sarah Lepinski in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Vinzenz Brinkmann, Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung.

Vinzenz Brinkmann delivered the keynote address. Session topics included new analytical and scholarly approaches for identifying and interpreting color on ancient sculpture; color, medium, and materiality in ancient and early modern sculptural traditions; the roles of reproductions of original works of art in expanding understanding of ancient polychromy; and the reception of ancient polychromy in modern and contemporary sculpture and architecture.

The Rome Transformed ‘Provocation’ Conference: Contesting Visualisations of the Eastern Caelian from the C1-C8 CE, at the BSR, Rome

23rd - 24th March, 2023.

The use of reconstruction and visualisation to order, interpret and present information about the structures and spaces of Ancient Rome has a pedigree stretching back centuries. Many of the resulting images and models have had an enduring impact on both scholarly and popular imagination, an impact that can be both positive and negative.

Rome Transformed uses advanced visualisations (‘provocations’) to develop understanding of the buildings and landscapes that occupied the eastern Caelian in Rome between the first and eighth centuries CE. This colloquium presented some of the project’s latest findings using provocations.

For further information, please see: The Rome Transformed ‘Provocation’ Conference: Contesting Visualisations of the Eastern Caelian from the C1-C8 CE – bsr.ac.uk

The Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series with Jennifer Stager (Johns Hopkins) at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York

22nd March, 2023 at 6:00pm (EST)

Jennifer Stager is a writer and art historian in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present (2022) and, with Leila Easa, Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags (2022).

The program was presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and was live-streamed.

PERCEIVE launch event - National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN), Italy

6th March, 2023.

PERCEIVE, an EU-funded project on Coloured Collections, AI and Virtual Experiences, was launched on 6th of March 2023, at the Auditorium of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN), during a special event open to scholar communities, cultural and creative sectors and civil society.

More on the project here: PERCEIVE – Perceptive Enhanced Realities of Colored collEctions through aI and Virtual Experiences (perceive-horizon.eu)