In a striking realization of the possibilities of interdisciplinary work, the exhibit ‘Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey’ held at the National Gallery in London inspired a collaboration with the University of Nottingham. With the additional support of the Royal Musical Association, scholars in musicology, art history, theatre studies and comparative literature joined forces to discuss interchanges between the disciplines, both then and now.

The weekend was unified by themes that crossed disciplinary boundaries, as well as source materials that resisted easy classification. The conference aimed to map exchanges between visual and theatrical arts, to identify intermediaries in the transmission between these broadly and loosely defined fields and to analyse persistent disciplinary attitudes and assumptions about these exchanges. Indeed, in sessions chaired by Sarah Hibberd (University of Nottingham), Benjamin Walton (University of Cambridge) and Richard Wrigley (University of Nottingham), scholars themselves collaborated throughout the conference, referring to each other's work and building on each other's ideas to break down disciplinary and intellectual borders.

Particular concerns recurred regularly during the conference, among them the idea of the ‘dramatic’ element in visual art and, in turn, the visual elements of the theatrical arts, as well as the role and status of audience reaction and critical response. Participants ended up questioning many of our assumptions about the stage during this period, and about the nature of spectacle and illusion, examining the traditions, generic requirements and challenges of each artistic medium from changing disciplinary perspectives. Both musicologists and art historians analysed staging from a technological perspective. Advances in lighting technology inspired the papers of both David Charlton (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Giovanna Constanti (University of Michigan). Charlton investigated the interaction between music and lighting in scenes of dawn in mid-eighteenth-century operas and opéras comiques, and found that music was frequently used ‘metaphorically’ to accompany motion and visual effects on stage. The combination of music and changes in the environment, he argued, exteriorized the emotional world; in an apt phrase, Charlton described music as ‘engraving for the ears’. Constanti approached stage lighting via extant engravings, looking at images of Daguerre's stage production of Isouard and Benincori's 1822 opéra-féerie Aladin, ou la lampe merveilleuse; she related these images to changes in the understanding of divine and artificial light. Céline Frigau (Université de Paris VIII) also looked at production materials, but from a variety of ballets and operas on the same subject: the peasant girl Clari and her transformation into a duchess. Frigau examined costume sketches, reviews and stage directions for Maria Malibran's performance as Clari in Halévy's 1828 opera and concluded that the ‘excess’ often criticized by reviewers was actually an aesthetic choice on the part of Malibran herself.

Thomas Grey (Stanford University) and Sarah Hibberd also analysed images associated with productions, but with an emphasis on the interplay between visual art and the stage. Grey addressed the gothic imaginary through literary, artistic and theatrical representations of the ‘Bleeding Nun’ in a wide-ranging discussion of the advantages and constraints of each medium, and the narrative effect of changes in the medium. Hibberd used similar production materials to discuss the adaptation of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa into operatic tableaux in Pilati and Flotow's 1839 Le Naufrage de la Méduse. Hibberd spoke about the role of music in constructing both temporal and spatial unfolding – a process that transformed Gericault's images into a drama paced by an overall tension between stasis and movement. The dramatic possibilities of painting also appeared in the paper of Stephen Bann (University of Bristol), which discussed Delaroche's use of doorways and accessories to convey the sense of a world beyond the scene of the painting.

Audience reaction and interaction, alongside theories of sensibility and affect, informed the papers of Tili Boon Cuillé (Washington University in St Louis), Beth S. Wright (University of Texas at Arlington) and Patricia Smyth (University of Nottingham). Cuillé applied a technique derived from literary studies of analysing an ‘implied spectator’ to tragédies en musique by Rameau and Gluck. In her study of score and stage directions she maintained that, even though mechanical limitations restricted the scale of the spectacle, the music and text appeal to the inner sensibility of audience members and encourage them to ‘cast beyond their perception of the mechanical’. The music and text, she argued, imply that the imagined effects should be greater even than the reality of the performance. Wright started off Saturday morning with a continued focus on audience reception, examining reactions to gestures in Delaroche's historical painting and the artist's changes in style in response to published criticism. Smyth also explored this subject in her paper on Delaroche's depiction of interior emotional states. Although critics frequently accused Delaroche of theatricality and melodrama, many spectators felt that the works conveyed authentic emotions precisely because of their deliberately awkward (and therefore more ‘natural’) bodily positions. Smyth related the public's positive reaction to Delaroche's ‘natural’ depictions of emotions to the reception of Marie Dorval's stage performances, which were likewise perceived as natural because of her ‘untheatrical’ distortion of her body.

Thierry Laugée (Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne) also examined appeals to the audience's sensibility, but in theatrical representations of artistic geniuses, particularly representations of Tasso. By transforming art history and the concept of the genius into dramatic love stories, he argued, many authors made geniuses more ‘approachable’ through their suffering and, moreover, were able to use representations of historical artists as a commentary on contemporary ones. Olivia Voisin (Université de Paris IV, Sorbonne) also considered the interaction between artists and the stage as she delved into the world of costume design, exploring the relationship between Jacques-Louis David and designer Louis Boulanger. Having studied the interaction of visual arts with costume design in the theatre, she concluded that artists tended to put their own constructions of history on stage and thereby steered tastes towards their own ‘historical’ aesthetic. Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney) continued to trace interactions between visual artists and the stage by mapping the shared social circle and artistic milieu of David and the Degotti brothers.

Peter Mondelli (University of Pennsylvania) continued to sketch these artistic and social milieux when he spoke about caricatures of Rossini in relation to the readership of the popular press. Finally, Richard Wrigley explored the modern scholar's relationship to earlier critics and audiences in his examination of Delécleuze, a critic for the Journal des débats. Delécleuze's discomfort with the contamination of visual art by ‘theatricality’ and his vehement support for the ideal of artistic autonomy appeared in his criticism of both visual art and theatre. Wrigley's recovery of critical voices to be heard alongside those of the audience ‘implied’ by the art work, and his insistence that tensions and exchanges between art forms should be the main sites of scholarly inquiry, despite the occasional discomforts of interdisciplinarity, provided an apt message for the end of the conference.