Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
30-31 May 2017
Slavic people from South-Eastern Europe immigrated to Italy throughout the Early Modern period and organized themselves into confraternities or founded colleges for students based on common origin and language. These institutions played a vital role in the construction of the image of the whole immigrant community and its visibility and recognition in the cosmopolitan urban contexts such as Venice, Rome, Bologna or Ancona, as well as in smaller centers of the Marche region. Moreover, they represent important hubs of exchange of ideas and knowledge both in Italy and with places of origin.
The conference aims at interdisciplinary perspective on images related to Schiavoni/Illyrian confraternities in Early Modern Italy. It explores both visual and linguistic constructs produced or commissioned by members of Schiavoni/Illyrian institutions, questioning intentions and mechanisms behind their creation, as well as the reverberation of their meaning in different contexts. These phenomena are also regarded in comparative perspective of similar expressions found in “proto-national” institutions of other foreign communities on the Apennine peninsula in the same period. The conference will bring together scholars working in the fields of art history, history, visual, literary and material culture studies, thus broadening the existing understanding of Schiavoni/Illyrian proto-national identity.
The conference is organized by the HRZZ research project Visualizing Nationhood: the Schiavoni/Illyrian Confraternities and Colleges in Italy and the Artistic Exchange with South East Europe (15th – 18th c.). The proceedings of the conference will be published as a special issue of Il Capitale Culturale. Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, University of Macerata peer-reviewed on line journal (WOS-ESCI; ERIH PLUS).