Publications by Ivana Vranic
PhD Dissertation, 2019
This dissertation explores a sculptural tradition from northern Italy which is frequently overloo... more This dissertation explores a sculptural tradition from northern Italy which is frequently overlooked in the art historical scholarship: life-size terracotta devotional groups. Composed of seven or more lifelike and often polychrome biblical characters, these works represent scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin, most commonly the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. The study examines over a dozen groups made between 1460 and 1560 by six terracotta sculptors—Niccolò dell’Arca, Guido Mazzoni, Agostino de’ Fondulis, Vincenzo Onofri, Alfonso Lombardi, and Antonio Begarelli—who worked for diverse patrons, from civic confraternities to monarchs, and in different urban centers, such as Bologna, Modena, Ferrara, and Milan. What makes the groups distinct in the history of sculpture, I propose, in contrast to most scholars, is not their subject matter, function, or even their format, but their artifice. The multi-stage process involved in modelling and firing clay to make life-size figures, I argue, was a highly specialized practice in the Renaissance—a period during which statues in marble and bronze became the epitome of sculpture. Building on one question—How were the terracotta groups made?—this study consolidates a large body of evidence, including primary sources, archival documents, and art historical studies. Tracing references to clay and terracotta in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, I demonstrate that although most Renaissance writers laud the skills associated with these groups and link terracotta to ancient sculpture, alongside the genesis of humans and art, they do not describe how sculpture is produced in this medium. Our knowledge about terracotta comes from modern art restorations, which I consult to explain how the groups were made and remade—repainted, remodelled, and reinstalled—since the fifteenth century. The technical history of the groups established in this dissertation contributes to recent scholarship on the materials and techniques of Renaissance sculpture by challenging the idea that terracotta was an inexpensive medium of popular art and by demonstrating it was a technology with which the northern Italian terracotta sculptors brought sacred narratives to life.
Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body. Eds. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin., 2023
Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body. Eds. Bronwen Wilson and Pa... more Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body. Eds. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin.
Making Worlds: Art, Materiality and Early Modern Globalization; Critical Terms
Book Reviews by Ivana Vranic
Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 76, n. 3, 2023
Renaissance Quarterly, 2023
PhD diss. by Ivana Vranic
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2019
Master's Thesis by Ivana Vranic
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2010
The Rondanini Pietà (1552-1564) engages the viewer in an embodied and temporal process of perceiv... more The Rondanini Pietà (1552-1564) engages the viewer in an embodied and temporal process of perceiving the becomings of sculpted form—rough and smooth surfaces, indentations, fissures andcontours—enfolded in the material and physical qualities of the marble block and its flesh-like surface. Emphasizing the process of creating the work, a multitude of chisel marks animate sculpted matter and prolong the eventual pausing of the viewer’s eyes. The materiality of the stone urges the viewer to move around to perceive the sculpture as it becomes transfigured anew through the continuous morphing of the facial and bodily features of its two figures: Christ and the Virgin. Deterring the comprehensibility of the subject matter, the enfolding of matter and form, conceptualized as the 'infinito', calls attention to the very rhetorical and ontological nature of the work as sculpture.
Kept in private collections for several centuries, the Rondanini Pietà is an uncommissioned sculpture considered to be the last work by Michelangelo Buonarroti. To interpret this Pietà, scholars have utilized established biographical, iconographic, and chronological approaches to the artist’s oeuvre. In 1934, Charles de Tolnay published the first modern study of the work, interpreting it as a testament of the artist’s religiosity—an interpretation that dominates the scholarship. Focusing primarily on a discussion of the Rondanini Pietà, this thesis introduces a concept of the infinito and with it a theoretical framework to expose the overdetermined nature of this scholarship. Judging the work to be either finished or unfinished (finito or non-finito) scholars rehearse the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, segregating matter from form and denying sculpture its ontological quality.
In order to understand what comes prior to the processes of description, interpretation and contextualization, what is at stake is to rethink how we approach sculpture as a medium that has specific physical and material characteristics that determine its rhetorical potential. Making the viewer part of how sculpture works to make temporally visible the becomings of form, the concept of the 'infinito' challenges us to reflect upon the methodologies used in the study of sculpture produced in the period.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Rondanini Pietà and the Infinito
Limits of Interpretation: Historiography and Iconography of the Rondanini Pietà
Leon Battista Alberti: The Rhetoric and Visibility of Sculpture
Locating Sculpted Matter in Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
The Concepts of Matter and Form: A Brief Look at Modern Philosophy
The Infinito: Perceiving the Temporal Enfolding of Matter and Form
Conference Papers & Presentations by Ivana Vranic
Renaissance Society of America, San Juan, 2023
Properzia de’ Rossi, a Bolognese sculptor active in the first decades of the sixteenth century, i... more Properzia de’ Rossi, a Bolognese sculptor active in the first decades of the sixteenth century, is the only known female sculptor to have worked in marble, which is why Giorgio Vasari dedicates a brief biography to her in his Lives of the Artists (1550). Curiously, Vasari neglects to explain how the sculptress, who was Michelangelo’s contemporary, acquired the skill to carve in a material that became synonymous with sculpture in this epoch. Situating de’ Rossi in the history of Renaissance sculpture, this paper aims to fill the lacuna left by Vasari. Rather than propose a mentorship for the artist however, I argue that the very ingenuity of making miniature sculpture in fruit stones, which is how de’ Rossi began her artistic career, is what prepared her for marble and gave her a unique advantage in Bologna, where local sculptors generally made sculpture in terracotta or wood. Her skill presents the ideal place from which to reconsider her work because it serves as a double-edged sword in her biography—on the one hand, it gained her immortality in the Vasarian history of the art and on the other, it made her a subject of much controversy.
RSA Virtual , 2021
During the early modern period, the mobility of images and artifacts increased worldwide alongsid... more During the early modern period, the mobility of images and artifacts increased worldwide alongside expanding trade routes, colonization, slavery, and missionary activities, among other historical factors. In Europe and Asia, many of these objects entered into encyclopedic collections where, it has been argued, they typified foreign and exotic places. However, these objects could have served other purposes as well. As many scholars have demonstrated recently, many of these objects affected host cultures on a much deeper level, changing the look, feel, and character of their new abodes. While never losing their foreign origins entirely, mobile objects transformed local identity in a variety of ways. For example, Chinese porcelain was appropriated, integrated, and reinvented as part and parcel of a Dutch lifestyle, even signalling "Dutchness" as a result; and Iznik ceramics were embraced by the Anabaptists in Moravia to create a distinctively local style of artistic production now referred to as Habaner pottery. This panel seeks new methods of understanding how the mobility of objects transformed their new locales. What is exoticism, and how exogenous objects and forms are assimilated into local and political imaginaries? Can exogenous objects ever be truly assimilated? How did the reframing of objects from elsewhere as local containers of identity change host cultures? How did cultures incorporating foreign objects use them when imagining their place in a wider world? Did these objects have multiple associations with different places; did they mobilise composite visions of identity?
McGill University, Montréal, 2018
Early Modern Intermediality, Stanford, 2018
KHI Studienkurs, Bologna, 2017
Early Modern Conversions, McGill University, 2017
Early Modern Conversions, Michigan University
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Publications by Ivana Vranic
Book Reviews by Ivana Vranic
PhD diss. by Ivana Vranic
Master's Thesis by Ivana Vranic
Kept in private collections for several centuries, the Rondanini Pietà is an uncommissioned sculpture considered to be the last work by Michelangelo Buonarroti. To interpret this Pietà, scholars have utilized established biographical, iconographic, and chronological approaches to the artist’s oeuvre. In 1934, Charles de Tolnay published the first modern study of the work, interpreting it as a testament of the artist’s religiosity—an interpretation that dominates the scholarship. Focusing primarily on a discussion of the Rondanini Pietà, this thesis introduces a concept of the infinito and with it a theoretical framework to expose the overdetermined nature of this scholarship. Judging the work to be either finished or unfinished (finito or non-finito) scholars rehearse the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, segregating matter from form and denying sculpture its ontological quality.
In order to understand what comes prior to the processes of description, interpretation and contextualization, what is at stake is to rethink how we approach sculpture as a medium that has specific physical and material characteristics that determine its rhetorical potential. Making the viewer part of how sculpture works to make temporally visible the becomings of form, the concept of the 'infinito' challenges us to reflect upon the methodologies used in the study of sculpture produced in the period.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Rondanini Pietà and the Infinito
Limits of Interpretation: Historiography and Iconography of the Rondanini Pietà
Leon Battista Alberti: The Rhetoric and Visibility of Sculpture
Locating Sculpted Matter in Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
The Concepts of Matter and Form: A Brief Look at Modern Philosophy
The Infinito: Perceiving the Temporal Enfolding of Matter and Form
Conference Papers & Presentations by Ivana Vranic
Kept in private collections for several centuries, the Rondanini Pietà is an uncommissioned sculpture considered to be the last work by Michelangelo Buonarroti. To interpret this Pietà, scholars have utilized established biographical, iconographic, and chronological approaches to the artist’s oeuvre. In 1934, Charles de Tolnay published the first modern study of the work, interpreting it as a testament of the artist’s religiosity—an interpretation that dominates the scholarship. Focusing primarily on a discussion of the Rondanini Pietà, this thesis introduces a concept of the infinito and with it a theoretical framework to expose the overdetermined nature of this scholarship. Judging the work to be either finished or unfinished (finito or non-finito) scholars rehearse the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, segregating matter from form and denying sculpture its ontological quality.
In order to understand what comes prior to the processes of description, interpretation and contextualization, what is at stake is to rethink how we approach sculpture as a medium that has specific physical and material characteristics that determine its rhetorical potential. Making the viewer part of how sculpture works to make temporally visible the becomings of form, the concept of the 'infinito' challenges us to reflect upon the methodologies used in the study of sculpture produced in the period.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Rondanini Pietà and the Infinito
Limits of Interpretation: Historiography and Iconography of the Rondanini Pietà
Leon Battista Alberti: The Rhetoric and Visibility of Sculpture
Locating Sculpted Matter in Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
The Concepts of Matter and Form: A Brief Look at Modern Philosophy
The Infinito: Perceiving the Temporal Enfolding of Matter and Form
What is a work unfinished? This panel seeks papers that critically probe this inquiry through early modern exempla of art, architecture, writing on art, and objects of visual culture considered unfinished. Small and multivalent case studies are equally invited, which investigate single objects, art projects, or entire oeuvres labelled not finished, here broadly conceived. Papers can also consider: is unfinished a formal, theoretical, symbolic, or contextual state of being? What or who decides on the criteria of the unfinished? Can an object go from being unfinished to finished? Does unfinishedness accrue value over time? And, finally, can any artistic product of the epoch be considered finished in the longue-durée of history? Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent using the UAAC " Call for Papers" form to Ivana Vranic by July 15.
And yet because art objects often failed to illustrate art texts art historians have often overlooked the ways in which early modern artists led and participated in the dialogic (and not dichotomous) relationship of theory and practice by producing objects that challenged and disturbed theoretical discourses.
The paired sessions “When Theory Fails? Artistic Practices in the Early Modern Period I: Bellini, Donatello, & Lombardi” and “When Theory Fails? Artistic Practices in the Early Modern Period II: Portraiture & Landscape” investigate the relationship between art theory and art practice in the early modern period through specific artists and genres. Although separate, the two panels in fact intersect in their discussions of how artists, including Bellini, Donatello, and Alfonso Lombardi, as well as, painters, portraitists and printmakers from Northern Italy, Europe and England, were influenced by, participated in, and responded to sixteenth-century art theoretical discourses through technically innovative practices and non-canonical mediums and genres. As the papers of these sessions will reveal, both the theoretical discourses and artistic practices helped shape one another during the early-modern period.
In order to trace these historical developments, we invite papers that consider the practical and/or theoretical ways in which medieval and early modern artists blurred, played with, and resisted boundaries of medium, material, form, and subject matter.
For submission details and regulations please see attached document.
imitating, translating, and citing classical authors, fifteenth-century humanists and artists sought to recover the history of the ancient past. In the sixteenth century, establishing teleological and genealogical links with the ancient world served to justify
political and economic goals of secular and religious leaders, leading some theologians and writers, including Erasmus, Luther, Montaigne and Rebelais among others, to be skeptical of such restoration efforts. This exploration and the subsequent questioning
culminates in the most significant acts of restoration: Reformation and Counter Reformation. Indeed, restoring the past was conceived as a way of reforming the present, of making it anew; hence, unearthed ruins and discovered objects acted less as relics and more as aids in discursive and material processes of experimentation and renewal.
Taking up different case studies, the proposed interdisciplinary papers will reveal the ways in which restoration in the sixteenth century was an ambitious philological and archaeological project that allowed for the creation of scientific discoveries, architectural theories, and artistic practices. The first panel explores objects of restoration, from the discovery of 'lost objects' of the past that served as new subjects for experimentation, to drawing and repainting of sculpture, both ancient and contemporary, as acts of reinterpretation. The second panel takes up the rich subject of architectural theory and its engagement with classical sources and its sixteenth-century interventions. By rethinking the restorative acts in the sixteenth century, the presentations will open up new questions about the ways in which writers, theoreticians and artists sought to rebuild, rewrite, and remake past histories and their artifacts in the present.
conceptualization of the world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, the early modern period has often been described in reference to changes resulting from the introduction of ideas that challenged previously accepted scientific, religious, and socio-political perceptions of the world, and the establishment of new ways of making its continuously expanding horizons more visible and seemingly knowable. While the need to precisely date and identify the cause and effect of such epistemological and technological shifts preoccupied twentieth-century scholars, recent studies have begun to question the very nature of change itself, as a finite set of historically contingent and perceptibly novel conditions. In fact, as the presenters will suggest, the movement from one text, religious identity, historical moment, or artistic medium, to another involves many translators, makers, viewers, and believers. The papers in the panel explore how forms of literary, religious, visual, technological, and material conversions could enable meditative, antithetical, affirmative, destructive, or generative processes of transformation.
Taking up case studies from theatre, poetry, history, art, and philosophy--ranging from Shakespeare to ancient artefacts--these papers suggest the multivalent nature of conversion from one way of being, making, or knowing to another. Through different forms of conversions, conceived of as translations, changes, mediations, transformations, and negotiations, early modern writers, theoreticians, and artists challenged and established new forms of spiritual truths, identity politics, epistemological paradigms, artistic traditions, and geographic boundaries. By tracing early modern conversions across divergent subjects, the presenters hope to contribute to a repositioning of our understanding of the early modern period itself.