Typography, Illustration and Ornamentation in The Early Modern Iberian Book World, 1450-1800 was held at Marsh’s Library in Dublin on 24-25 May 2018.

This cross-disciplinary international conference was organised by UCD Professor Sandy Wilkinson as part of the Iberian Book Project at UCD. The conference reflected on the broad themes of typography, illustration, and ornamentation in early-modern Spain, Portugal and the New World between 1450 and 1800. The conference also celebrated the completion of the latest phase of Iberian Books, covering the second half of the seventeenth century. Ornamento, an online repository of around a quarter of a million Spanish and Portuguese ornaments and illustrations, was also demonstrated at the conference.

The first keynote at the conference was given by Professor Thomas Cummins from Harvard University. His lecture was entitled ‘Writ Large: Printing, Painting, and Conversion in 16th Century America’.

Thomas B. F. Cummins

Thomas Cummins is The Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art and Chairman of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. from UCLA, 1988. He taught for eleven years at the University of Chicago and was the Director of The Center of Latin American Studies from 1998-2001. He was also the acting Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University 2003-04. He has lived and taught in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Image: detail from ‘New Inventions of Modern Times [Nova Reperta], The Invention of Copper Engraving, plate 19’, circa 1600. [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].