The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute's 2024-2025 Annual Conference, "Big Paper," takes place on Friday and Saturday, January 24 and 25, 2025. BIG PAPER is a play on the Italian word cartone, the art historical term for a preparatory drawing made on a one-to-one scale to the final work: carta = paper and -one = big. In the Renaissance, these cartoons were made during the production of wall-sized expanses of frescoes, tapestries and stained glass. They could be massive paper structures, each made by joining hundreds of individual small pieces to form a support sometimes as large as eleven feet high and seventeen feet long. Their construction were feats of precision engineering, involving scissors and pastepot as well as charcoal, ink and gouache; their use often required implements for hanging, cutting, perforating, and tracing. In the early sixteenth century, such cartoons evolved from preparatory materials to be discarded to ben finiti cartoni, or cartoons so well finished that they could be presented to favored patrons and displayed as artworks in their own right. At the same time, cartoons were made for small, hand-held works as well, for instance, the pricked design for needlework in the Huntington Library’s copy of  John Taylor’s 1634 The Needles Excellency. This public conference explores paper in early modern Europe in terms of its use as sheets, pieces joined together or bound codices; relationships between books, bodies, and architectural space; period notions of “scale” and design; and the ties between drawing, monument, and myth. Thus, we take “big” to mean large in material size, but also in terms of intellectual and artistic possibilities, as well as geographic and imaginative scope.

Lisa Pon, the conference organizer, is Professor of Art History (USC) and the EMSI Seminar Leader for the Visual & Material Culture and On Paper Seminar series. Presenters include Juliana Barone (The Warburg Institute), Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania), Tracy Cosgriff (College of Wooster), Mari Yoko Hara (University of Notre Dame), Maurizio Michelozzi (Uffizi Gallery), Morgan Ng (Yale University), and Michael Waters (Columbia University).

This event is organized in cultural partnership with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. All EMSI events are free and open to the public.