Travelling Objects, Travelling People: Art and Artists of Late-Medieval and Renaissance Iberia and Beyond c1400-1550

Dense but fascinating two day online conference from the Courtauld Research Forum on how art and artistic ideas moved between Spain and Portugal, the rest of Europe and into the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The conference took the form of a keynote lecture and five panels of three talks on a shared theme. The keynote looked at the prevalence of Flemish art for the period in Madeira, brought by the trade routes. The speaker, Fernando Antonio Baptista Pereira, had some wonderful pictures of works in the Museum of Scared Art of Funchal.

The panels looked at how objects and ideas moved around the Mediterranean and introduced me to the idea of an image chain through the spread of and popularity of prints by Martin Schongauer of the Passion. They also looked at Italian and Flemish artists working in Spain and Spanish artists in Italy, partly moving there in the wake of the Spanish Pope Alexander IV.

There were interesting sessions looking at architecture but I think my favourite was Kelley Helmstutler di Dio looking at the mechanics and costs of moving large sculptures across Europe, taking detailed accounts of moving a statue of Henry IV of France from Florence to Paris. The cost of moving it far outweighed the price the artist got for it. I’d never thought of those practicalities when looking art.

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