ABSTRACT
James Elkins: Bob and I thought we would divide today’s conversation into two topics. In this morning’s session, we will be talking about sources of coherence or disarray within Renaissance studies; and in the afternoon we’ll address the apparently larger topic of relations between Renaissance studies and studies of modernism and postmodernism-and especially the strange fact that the Renaissance seems at once tremendously important, pivotal, or indispensable in art history as a whole, and at the same time sunken into a kind of neglect or “oblivion,” to use Leo Steinberg’s term.
