Pages, Plaster, and Computer Screens: Reimagining Raphael and the Library of Julius II (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Pages, Plaster, and Computer Screens: Reimagining Raphael and the Library of Julius II
Author: Tracy Cosgriff
Author: Lisa Pon
Abstract: Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, once the private library of Julius II, manifest a monumental thesis on Renaissance theories of word and image. The rediscovery of the Stanza’s collection of deluxe volumes demonstrates that the chamber was animated by a recursive chain of media, from painting to text. Using 3D technologies to reunite the books and the frescoes, this panoramic reconstruction illuminates new dimensions of the Stanza’s experience for its early visitors and elucidates the synergistic intellectual web on which the room's design was predicated. It asks: How was the Stanza engaged by its early modern audience? How might the spatial analysis of the pope’s literary collection shape our interpretation of the chamber’s meaning? How does the relationship of text and image inform our understanding of Renaissance cultures of reading? And how do these investigations inform current urgent
discussions about what a library has been and could become?
Date: 03/13/2023
Primary URL: https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/2822/2023Simmons_Pon_Cosgriff.pdf
Conference Name: 2023 Terry K. Simmons Lecture, Innovation Institute, Tulane University
Hybrid Scholars for Hybrid Histories: Virtual Reality and the Italian Renaissance (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Hybrid Scholars for Hybrid Histories: Virtual Reality and the Italian Renaissance
Author: Deanna Shemek
Author: Lisa Pon
Abstract: The contemporary information Renaissance offers powerful possibilities for investigating and representing the culture of the historical Renaissance for which Italy is celebrated around the world. This panel will present two digital projects that fuse traditional modes of study of the period (philology, paleography, art history) with applications of virtual reality, data mining, digital measurement and other tools. Such projects rely on several kinds of hybridity. From cross-disciplinary co-creation to multi-media delivery, they offer new pathways not only for preservation and access regarding archival and rare bibliographic materials, but also hybrid spaces for scholarly collaboration and teaching. Far from alienating or “diluting” traditional resources, digital tools convey the multi-sensory complexity of Renaissance artifacts and spaces, and, at their best, offer immersive, interactive experiences that recapture the scale, detail, cognitive density, and aesthetic specificity of historical resources that are often not accessible to the general public. IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive features archival document visualization, immersive virtual reality, art history and economic history, and bibliographic data in a set of interlocking and increasingly interactive projects led by a team of specialists from around the world. The Bibliotheca Iulia Instaurata (BI2) brings together book historians, classicists, art historians and interactive media artists to offer a chance to experience selected books from Pope Julius II's private library amid Raphael's frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, the intended setting for these precious manuscripts.
Date: 02/25/2023
Primary URL: https://cla.csulb.edu/event/hybridity-the-california-interdisciplinary-consortium-of-italian-studies/
Conference Name: Hybridity - The California Interdisciplinary Institute of Italian Studies
Renaissance Hyperlinks: Pope Julius II’s Books amid Raphael’s Paintings (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Renaissance Hyperlinks: Pope Julius II’s Books amid Raphael’s Paintings
Author: Andreas Kratky
Author: Lisa Pon
Abstract: We have built a digital exploration of the early sixteenth-century private library of Pope Julius II, that we, using the vocabulary of the Renaissance humanists he admired, call the Bibliotheca Iulia instaurata, or the Julian Library renewed. Julius' library was a veritable Renaissance system of knowledge akin to today's hyperlinked information networks, which anticipated the concept of hyperlinks by establishing rich spatial references connecting different parts of the room, frescoes, books and furniture pieces to build a discursive space for knowledge.
Julius II’s private library was housed in the Vatican Palace room painted by Raphael between 1509 and 1511 for Julius, now known as the Stanza della Segnatura. The main frescoes depict gatherings of thinkers from Greek antiquity to Julius’ own time, from Homer and Plato to Gregory the Great and Raphael himself. The frescoes' themes—Philosophy, Poetry, Theology, and Jurisprudence—pictorially synthesize relationships between these four major disciplines from the period, and Julius collected books in all of them. Almost two hundred of Julius’ books survive today, and Raphael’s frescoes refer almost recursively to them, their authors, and their diverse fields of study.
The digital environment we have made allows visitors to explore how Julius and Raphael--major figures in the Renaissance-- used pictures, texts, and material artifacts to build a space for learning about their world. Our project aims to make the conceptual system linking these materials accessible and relevant for a contemporary audience and to create a digital version of the Renaissance system of knowledge it manifests. Our approach combines the study of books and paintings that have most often been studied separately, despite the historical fact that early visitors encountered the two together. Furthermore, by using interpretive strategies from art history, material culture, and literature as well as ... [see Secondary URL Description below]
Date: 06/26/2023
Primary URL: https://sharpweb.org/sharp2023/
Primary URL Description: Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing (SHARP) organizes a conference to explore the opportunities and distortions or limitations that technology has created or is likely to create for book history. Topics relate to the theme of Textual Interactions Past, Present and Future.
Hosted by the Centre for the Book at the University of Otago, New Zealand, SHARP 2023 will run entirely online over three days, allowing participation from anywhere.
June 26-29, 2023
Secondary URL Description: Furthermore, by using interpretive strategies from art history, material culture, and literature as well as interactive media, game design, and digital humanities, this project illuminates how linear perspective, Renaissance painting’s contribution to the modeling of three-dimensional space, and period concepts of knowledge have a legacy in today’s digital constructs.
We propose a three-part research lab session at SHARP 2023 including (1) a presentation of our project, (2) time to virtually visit our digital library of Julius II, (3) time to collect responses and comments and to ask and answer questions.
Conference Name: Affordances and Interfaces: Textual Interactions Past, Present and Future
The Bibliotheca Iulia Instaurata: a digital reconstruction of the library of Pope Julius II in the Vatican Palace, Stanza Della Segnatura (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Bibliotheca Iulia Instaurata: a digital reconstruction of the library of Pope Julius II in the Vatican Palace, Stanza Della Segnatura
Author: Lisa Pon
Author: Frederic Nolan Clark
Abstract: The Bibliotheca Iulia Instaurata is a digital immersive environment in which visitors can choose, handle, read, and annotate book assets representing manuscripts, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, that were once part of Julius II's personal library. We will discuss Renaissance practices of reading and commentary, and our development of "digital interleaves" for our project.
Date: 06/09/2022
Primary URL: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/node/10771
Primary URL Description: A Warburg Institute online workshop organised by Rheagan Martin (CASVA Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts Predoctoral Fellow) and Louisa McKenzie (Warburg/LAHP PhD candidate).
Digital humanities tools are increasingly deployed as research methodologies. Each digital project brings with it its own set of challenges: the binary nature of digital platforms often forces the researcher to present subjective decisions as objective fact, which otherwise may have been moulded with metaphorical language. This workshop will focus on both the institutional and individual level, with an emphasis on digital projects as tools for investigating interdisciplinary concepts of cultural memory.
Conference Name: Between Technology and Theory: Digital Humanities Projects in Progress
Digital Lenses and Renaissance Readings: Reimagining Raphael in the Library of Julius II (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Digital Lenses and Renaissance Readings: Reimagining Raphael in the Library of Julius II
Author: Tracy Cosgriff
Abstract: Raphael's frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, once the private library of Julius II, manifest a monumental thesis on Renaissance theories of word and image. The rediscovery of the Stanza's collection of deluxe volumes demonstrates that the chamber was animated by a recursive chain of media, from painting to text. Using 3D technologies to reunite the books and the frescoes, this panoramic reconstruction illuminates new dimensions of the Stanza's experience for its early visitors and elucidates the synergistic intellectual web on which the room's design was predicated. It asks: How was the Stanza engaged by its early modern audience? How might the spatial analysis of the pope's literary collection shape our interpretation of the chamber's meaning? How does the relationship of text and image inform our understanding of Renaissance cultures of reading? And how do these investigations inform current urgent discussions about what a library has been and could become?
Date: 12/02/2022
Primary URL: https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/22virtual/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/13569
Primary URL Description: Digital Humanities Panel IV: New Affordances of Digital Visualization and Simulation in the Arts of Italy
Conference Name: Renaissance Society of American Virtual Conference 2022
From there to here (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: From there to here
Abstract: This session explores the power of experiencing the past in the present and the present in the past through the arts and technology.
Author: Lisa Pon
Author: d. Sabela Grimes
Date: 02/15/2023
Location: Sidney Center (previously known as the Harman Academy); Doheny Memorial Library
Primary URL: https://polymathic.usc.edu/event/there-here
Primary URL Description: Choreographer-writer-composer-educator d. Sabela Grimes performs and discusses his movement meditations in LA's Leimert Park as QUANTUM aka kwon aka quantAUM... Art historian Lisa Pon describes reading, technology, and knowledge in the Renaissance, today and in the future.
From Scrolls to Scalar: the History of the Book (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: From Scrolls to Scalar: the History of the Book
Abstract: Paper is a technology. And paper technology has endured from Renaissance Europe through the 2020 pandemic spring as a platform for making, holding and disseminating knowledge. Now we find ourselves in a moment of transition in which personal meetings are replaced by Zoom and paper gives way to PDFs. So are technologies of paper and the digital terminally incompatible? Applying a polymathic approach demonstrates quite the opposite, rather that the two technologies intertwined can produce knowledge heretofore unseen.
Scalar Creative Director Erik Loyer and Professor of Art History Lisa Pon join our polymathic community to explicate the ways and spaces where text and the digital intersect right here at USC. With the Remastering the Renaissance Project, for instance, the USC Libraries’ special collections, the School of Cinematic Arts, the Classics and Art History Departments, and the Ahmanson Lab form just one of several polymathic collaborative ensembles where the application of virtual technologies illuminates ancient texts to speak and disseminate new and profound forms of knowledge. Scalar, a platform for media-rich scholarly publishing, facilitates similar functions and is a tool that all of our polymaths can learn and apply to their own scholarship—in any and all disciplines across the university. We are limited only by our imagination with the discoveries to be made by the intersection of technologies of the past (ie: paper) with the emerging technologies of today and the future (Multimedia, VR, AR, GIS, AI to name a few). And polymaths are, indeed, of the imaginative sort.
Author: Lisa Pon
Author: Erik Loyer
Date: 04/07/2021
Location: Online event during COVID lockdown
Primary URL: https://polymathic.usc.edu/event/scrolls-scalar-history-book?width=600px&height=400px&inline=true
A Virtual Experience of Pope Julius II's Library in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A Virtual Experience of Pope Julius II's Library in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura
Author: Andreas Kratky
Abstract: Our project seeks to construct an immersive digital environment of the Stanza della Segnatura and its original contents, using Scalar as a back-end authoring platform to annotate and tag connections between the library’s books, images, and themes, and using Unity 3D to visualize them. This virtual reality environment will enable contemporary audiences everywhere to "visit" this canonical space, open window shutters, move furnishings, and select books from recreated shelves.
Date: 10/21/2021
Primary URL: https://polymathic.usc.edu/usc-working-group-scholarly-vr-ar-and-3d-modeling
Conference Name: USC Working Group on Scholarly VR, AR, and 3D Modeling