36. Early Modern Interiors: Aesthetic practices, Representation and Sensorial Experience

Recent research networks (such as Early Modern Sensory Experiences and COST Action SENSES) highlight the importance of the senses, affect, and embodied experience in understanding early modern visual culture. This session explores how painted interiors and related forms of decoration shaped multisensory encounters with the built environment during the long seventeenth century. The session considers painted interiors and related objects as dynamic environments that engaged viewers through sight, touch, sound, movement, memory and emotion.

Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from art history, architectural history, literature, philosophy, musicology, theatre studies and material culture, the session asks how painting interacted with architecture, objects, performance, and everyday practices to produce immersive aesthetic experiences. It also considers how early modern theories of perception and the senses can reshape our understanding of decorative schemes, and how global exchange and material circulation informed sensory environments across the period.

We welcome papers that examine painted interiors alongside other immersive artistic contexts, including domestic, civic, courtly, religious, theatrical, and temporary spaces. Contributions may engage with histories of the senses, affect, phenomenology, materiality, and the reconstruction of historical experience, as well as the implications of this research for heritage interpretation and public engagement.

By foregrounding sensory experience and embodied perception, the session aims to contribute to current debates on early modern aesthetics and to foster dialogue across disciplines concerned with the relationship between art, architecture, music and material culture, and lived experience.

Themes: Early modern, interiors, senses

Additional format comment: Papers with questions.

Lead Convenor: Lydia Hamlett, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Emanuela Vai, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.