Mettere mano. Reworking Early Modern Drawings

Few other media are as easily and as quickly altered as paper: folding, pasting, trimming, and bleaching require readily accessible tools and minimal expertise in their handling. Reworking by another hand — highlighting, retracing, adding or erasing marks — as well as archival and curatorial practices — mounting and re-mounting, inscribing, stamping, and annotating — can alter the drawing’s appearance, reception, attribution, and market value. Equally important is the slow material change of paper or ink over time, triggered by the most common environmental conditions. Being uniquely vulnerable, drawings are a productive starting point for thinking about the ways in which the material turn might be brought to bear on an object's material afterlife, and beyond the artist’s initial conception and expression.

The Gernsheim Study Days bring together scholars, curators, and conservators to think critically about early modern practices of material interaction and manipulation as they applied to drawings. The conference is also connected to “Rework” (2024/25), the Annual Research Initiative of the BHMPI Lise Meitner Group Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History; the Getty Paper Project “Touched/Retouched: Paper across Time, 1400–1800,” a collaboration with the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica; and the forthcoming Research Exhibition “Rework, Retouch, Care: Case Studies from the Hertziana Collection” (March 2025).

Keynote Lecture
Jonathan Bober: Mettere mani: A Typology of Rework in Drawings

Speakers
Angelamaria Aceto, Stefan Albl, Heiko Damm, Bruno Escobar, Sietske Fransen, Mari Yoko Hara, François Marandet, Silvia Massa, Elizabeth Mattison, Lorenza Melli, Laura Moretti, Alice Ottazzi, Cara Rachele, Birgit Reissland

Concept and Scientific Organization
Tatjana Bartsch, Francesca Borgo, Johannes Röll

_{Caption: Michelangelo, Preliminary Study for the Hand of God (detail), c. 1511. Haarlem, Teylers Museum, Inv. A 25}