About the Annual Workshop

Named after one of the leading Etruscologists of the 20th century, the Larissa Bonfante Workshop of Etruscan and Italic Arts is an annual gathering in New York City that focuses on the arts and architecture of Italy before and across the establishment of Rome’s political hegemony within the peninsula, with the aim of bringing to full fruition their potential for scholarly study. It interrogates the aesthetic, historical, and epistemological richness of the visual culture of Etruscans and all of Italy’s peoples in order to reflect on the current state of scholarship and identify new avenues of inquiry: Where does the study of Etruscan (and cognate) arts stand within the disciplinary landscape of Etruscology? And where does the study of Italic arts stand with respect to the questions and issues pursued by the broader fields of the history of art and visual studies as they have been developing in recent decades? Where is it going — and where should it go?

The ambition of the workshop is to advance our understanding of the artistic and visual dimensions of Italy before and in the midst of Roman occupation by promoting discussion and sustained reflection on their role within the field of Etruscan and Italic studies, but it does not prescribe a specific intellectual agenda. To address the aforementioned questions, it adopts an intentionally open-ended perspective and a multiplicity of formats: presentations of novel findings that invite us to reconsider our assumptions about art historical developments; case studies suggesting new methodological and theoretical approaches; surveys of past scholarship concerning both specific and general aspects of Etruscan art and the art of Italic peoples; re-examination of understudied artifacts; discussions of ongoing research projects, collective and individual, with a prevailing art historical focus; and so on.