Mettere mano: Reworking Early Modern Drawings.

In the ‘Vita of Taddeo Zuccari’, Giorgio Vasari describes the reworking of drawings — in contrast to that of paintings — as a common and spontaneous practice. The 2025 Gernsheim Study Days are dedicated to all aspects of reworking, retouching, and repairing early modern European drawings, engaging with both artistic and material issues.

Few other media are as easily and as quickly altered as paper: folding, pasting, trimming, and bleaching require readily accessible tools and minimal expertise in their handling. Reworking by another hand — highlighting, retracing, adding or erasing marks — as well as archival and curatorial practices — mounting and re-mounting, inscribing, stamping, and annotating — can alter the drawing’s appearance, reception, attribution, and market value. Equally important is the slow material change of paper or ink over time, triggered by the most common environmental conditions. Being uniquely vulnerable, drawings are a productive starting point for thinking about the ways in which the material turn might be brought to bear on an object's material afterlife, and beyond the artist’s initial conception and expression.

The Photographic Collection’s Gernsheim Study Days this year are connected to “Rework” (2024/25), the Annual Research Initiative of the BHMPI Lise Meitner Group Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History; the Getty Paper Project “Touched/Retouched: Paper across Time, 1400–1800,” a collaboration with the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica; and the forthcoming Research Exhibition “Rework, Retouch, Care: Case Studies from the Hertziana Collection” (March 2025).

Speakers include Prof Laura Moretti presenting, 'Assembling, Gluing, and Framing: The Role of Artist Portraits in Vasari’s (and Gaddi’s) “Libro de’ disegni”', on Wednesday 5 March.

The event takes place in person and online.