Tuesday, Feb 27, 2024
4:00-5:30pm
Victoria University Common Room, 89 Charles St. W.
As has been well explored in scholarship on Early Modern Italy, the sixteenth-century saw the rise of what came to be called in the paragone (or comparison) among the arts—sculpture and painting for example, poetry and painting, or music and painting. Coined in the nineteenth century and with agon (from the Greek for competition or battle) at its core, the term alludes to the fact that one art nearly always trumps another in such comparisons. Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci’s notes of the 1490s now in the Codex Urbinas set the stage on which there would almost inevitably be winners and losers; here, painting takes on and defeats each of poetry, music, and sculpture one after another. But as the paragone variously played out in academic debate and theoretical literature across the century, these would prove to be mere skirmishes on the battlefield of the arts. For the real battle was over which one among them was rightly the metadiscipline that subsumed and ruled over all the others. Yet the sixteenth-century claim for metadisciplinary has seldom been acknowledged by modern scholars. In this presentation, I will outline a range of these claims made for certain arts and then address the deeply invested and elaborate arguments presented by the painter-art theorist-academician Federico Zuccaro some one hundred years after Leonardo’s notes to secure this position for painting through disegno—understood both as drawing and as the conceptual process that was said to be at its core. As Zuccaro would publicly assert in 1608, “Disegno è quasi un’altro Sole” (Disegno is nearly another sun), a kind of wellspring from which the arts (and other disciplines) were generated and nourished.
Leslie Korrick
Department of Visual Art and Art History, York University
Based in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, Leslie Korrick also holds appointments in the graduate programs in Art History & Visual Culture, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Science & Technology Studies. Her research interests include intersections between the arts and interarts methodologies, sound studies, and constructions of culture through art, architecture, urban spaces, collecting, and display in both historical and contemporary contexts. Currently, she is completing a book supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on relationships between Italian painting and music in Early Modern theory and practice. Her most recent essay associated with this project appears in Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2023).
