Manipulations.
The practice of retouching, repurposing, and reframing objects in early modern collecting.

When an object is collected, it begins a new life. It does not freeze in time, as it can still be altered and manipulated. This panel, sponsored by The Society for the History of Collecting, seeks to analyze, on a visual, material, and theoretical level, the various interventions made by artists, collectors, merchants, and restorers on artworks after their completion as these came to be part of a collection. Within this framework, many concepts come into play: reworking, retouching, alteration, manipulation, integration, correction, refreshing, reframing, repurposing. These interventions often respond to a need for conservation or restoration, sometimes they are carried out for aesthetic or repurposing needs, other times they are the result of a misunderstanding as to an object’s original intention when this crossed cultural boundaries.

Whatever the reason, such practices have consequences that lead to changes in the artwork’s status of completeness, its function, its display or storage, and the way it is interpreted. Identifying, analyzing, and understanding these practices allows for a layered understanding of an object’s life, from its production to its reception, within a complex temporal framework. What type of interventions are executed? How are they carried out, and by whom? Are there written sources that transmit this technical and material knowledge? What are the aesthetic and theoretical consequences of these actions on the objects themselves? Moreover, nowadays, how do scholars critically define these practices, considering their complex entanglements with concepts of authorship, originality and style?

Open to different media, we welcome contributions that explore cases from any geographical region during the early modern period. By privileging both diachronic and synchronic approaches, we aim to measure and analyze the growing interest in the physical condition of artworks, as well as in the conservation, restoration, and repurposing practices applied to objects within collections, broadly understood.

Proposals should be for 20-minute papers and must include:

• a title (15 words maximum),
• an abstract (150 words maximum), 
• keywords 
• a CV (1 page maximum)