Early Modern Artists’ Signatures 

Today, artistic identity is central to many of the most active avenues of inquiry. In many ways, signatures are the gateway to those inquiries. Some recently unearthed signatures have shifted attributions to women and under-studied minority artists. This has enabled rediscoveries of artists, oeuvres, and the roles of women in artistic practice and discourse. The increased practice of technical art history has played a part in rediscovering signatures that have been obscured. Despite the importance of signatures for grounding studies of makers’ identities, initial intentions and functions of signatures in early modernity remain incompletely understood.

Conversely, related disciplines have turned to related concepts. Studies of scribal culture (Bhal and Hanβ, 2022), printing privileges (Buning and Rijks, 2024) and epigraphy (Favreau, 1997) have interrogated the interconnections between names, readers, and markets across the globe. These studies thoughtfully illuminate aspects of the place of creators’ names on objects and the means of visualizing those names within early modern European culture. Alternatively in histories of art, many of the concepts associated with signatures, such as self-awareness or self-inscribed authorship, have not engaged signatures directly (Stoichita,1997; Atkins, 2012).

We ask speakers to bring an interdisciplinary approach to these inquiries and/ or critique the conceptual and terminological underpinnings of signature and its practice. We encourage papers that place signatures at the heart of interconnections between making and writing, viewing and reading, memory and record-making, fragility and permanence, stability and novelty. Papers can focus on a particular artist, medium, professional milieu, viewership, region or network. 

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Susan Jones, Northeastern University London, su.jones@northeastern.edu

Christopher Atkins, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Center for Netherlandish Art, catkins@mfa.org