The study group The Nineteenth Century in co-operation with the Huizinga Institute, Research Institute of Cultural History organises a symposium on the character of nineteenth-century visual culture. This two-day symposium will be held on 22 and 23 Nov

The study group The Nineteenth Century in co-operation with the Huizinga Institute, Research Institute of Cultural History organises a symposium on the character of nineteenth-century visual culture.
This two-day symposium will be held on 22 and 23 November 2002 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The study group calls everyone that studies this subject in the broadest sense to send in abstracts for a presentation at this symposium. During the nineteenth century numerous technical innovations created a new 'mediascape'. The new media answered to a growing demand for information about nature, culture and history and simultaneously inspired new research.
Contemporary art, philosophy and physiology testify to the fascination for vision and for the visual perception of reality. The places where knowledge could be acquired by looking changed in nature and scale, for instance the panorama, the museum, the department store and the international exhibition. These places literally became more visible as a result of new methods of lighting. The invention of gas lighting, later electric lighting, also changed the street scene and street life. Indoors, the arrival of gas and electric lighting created new forms of domestic life and reading culture.

Things that previously could only be seen in images were brought within reach because of new methods of transport and the rise of tourism, that in turn caused a flood of new images. (School)books, journals and sheet music got more illustrations and were richly ornamented and bound in colourful covers.

The symposium will try to answer the following questions. What changes can be perceived in visual culture between 1800 and 1900? To what extent does nineteenth-century visual culture differ from the previous and the following century? Other themes are the distribution and accessibility of contemporary visual information and the appreciation of the visual by the nineteenth-century audiences.

Abstracts(max. 250 words) can be sent to Marlite Halbertsma,secretary of the study group The Nineteenth Century, halbertsma@fhk.eur.nl
before 15 April 2002.

Information
Marlite Halbertsma
+31 (0)10 408 24 44

or Julia Noordegraaf
+31 (0)10 408 12 48,