Call: Workshop 06.–08.05.2026 »›Tractive Forces‹ Potentials of Art in the Trecento«, Warburg-Haus and CAS, Hamburg

7 November 2025

The CAS »Imaginaria of Force« (UHH) invites applications for the workshop »›Tractive Forces‹ Potentials of Art in the Trecento«, which will take place from May 6 to 8, 2026 at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg as well as the seminar room of the CAS »Imaginaria of Force«.

Pull, draw, attract, and captivate. The question of »tractive forces« in fourteenth-century Italian art has so far received only limited scholarly attention. Yet these forces illuminate qualities that allow us to examine production processes, materiality, and mediality, as well as motifs and their beholders, in their physical, metaphysical, technical, and aesthetic dimensions. It is not by chance, we hypothesise, that Francesco Petrarca speaks of a “force” (vis) in his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul (De remediis utriusque fortunae, 1350–1366) to warn his readers of the power of art – its capacity to make beholders “cling” (inhaere) to paintings and even to “capture” (capere) their intellect.

The workshop takes such »tractive forces« in an expanded sense as its point of departure, bringing art-historical analyses into dialogue with approaches from the history of science, literature, and philosophy. How are »tractive forces« modelled in Trecento works of art? Are they primarily derived from iconographic sources, or do they reveal a particular interest in tracing visible and invisible chains of effect? To what extent does this perspective allow us to consider works of art in relation to their reception? What visual strategies and technical procedures are adopted, refined, or developed to depict and generate pull and attraction? What roles do architectures, frames, and other devices (such as curtains, parapets, and grilles) play in the dynamics of attraction and distancing? Which literary, rhetorical, natural-philosophical, or moral-theological considerations underlie these dynamics?

Please send your proposals, including an abstract of no more than one page and the keyword »Tractive Forces« in the subject line, by December 15, 2025 to: imaginarien.der.kraft"AT"uni-hamburg.de.

>> Announcement of the Workshop »›Tractive Forces‹ Potentials of Art in the Trecento« (PDF)