Call for Papers
Renaissance Society of America 2027
Fifteenth-Century Problems
DUE: 15 July, 2026

The fifteenth century occupies an uneasy place in art history: simultaneously ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, yet also suspended somewhere in between, it is overburdened with paradoxes and inherited assumptions about artistic practices during a transitional century. Art historians construct narratives on the artistic personalities of largely anonymous “masters” from scant documentary evidence and surviving examples. Workshops are imagined as neatly ordered around masters, pupils, followers, and circles, even as we possess little concrete evidence for how fifteenth-century workshops actually functioned. Fabricated names (the Master of the Legend of St. Lucy, the Masters of the Dark Eyes, the Imperialissima-Meister, and so many more) and intricate webs of attribution place fifteenth-century artistic production uncomfortably between medieval models of anonymous collaboration and early modern notions of authorship. Simply put, approaches to understanding fifteenth-century artists weirdly straddle two worlds—and trying to make sense of it is even weirder.

This session invites papers that interrogate the methods and assumptions shaping the study of fifteenth-century art in all media. How might we define the fifteenth century on its own terms, rather than through early modern standards? We welcome contributions that address problems specific to the study of fifteenth-century artistic production, especially those that can reflect on the structures that led us here, as well as new directions that resist the status quo:

--Reflect critically on historiographical and methodological structures that have shaped periodization (simultaneously medieval & early modern), labels of convenience, workshops, and artistic personalities

--Expose the limits of traditional methods on causality, influence, & style

--Propose new approaches that reconfigure our old assumptions (e.g., AI attributions)

If you have fifteenth-century problems, please send an abstract (max 200 words) and short 2-page C.V. to Larisa Grollemond (LGrollemond@getty.edu) and Laura Tillery (ltillery@hamilton.edu) by 15 July.