Events

While it is well known that the optical revolution completely changed our perception of the world, thanks in particular to the invention of the telescope and the microscope, its importance for the development of art history remains largely underestimated. However, the sources at our disposal clearly reveal that art connoisseurs and theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries were quick to exploit advances in optics to improve their own protocols for reading art objects. [di più]

A selection of historical photographic prints that are based on the earliest negatives inventoried for the photo collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and that have been recently attributed to the Saxon military captain Paul Lindner (c. 1845–c. 1924), sheds light on the work of this completely unknown autodidactic photographer active in Rome around 1900. [di più]

The Photographic Collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome will host the second annual meeting of the Working group Italy of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V. The workshop will focus on primary sources and archival collections in post-unitarian Italy, which serve as a fundamental tool for provenance research. [di più]

Until recently the textile medium lacked a theory, which undermined its status as fine art in the academic discourse. However, being silent does not mean that it does not think. In early modern art, tapestry can reveal an aesthetic self-awareness of the textile medium which awaits to be fully explored and unfolded through the close reading and contextualization of works as singular phenomena with a potential of generalization. [di più]

This conclusive conference of the project “Conques in the Global World” aims at reviewing the question implicit in the projects main title: How is the knowledge we generate about Conques conditioned by the frames of references we apply and what is the right scale of observation to answer our research questions? How does the choice of scale predetermine the results? [di più]

Whereas drawings only begin to change after they have been drawn, prints can change before, during, and after printing. [di più]

Recent discussions in aesthetics and art history, literature, and visual studies have seen a renewed interest in questions of form and formalism. Whether in connection with algorithmic thinking, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, or with transcultural comparisons, revised narratives of modernism, re-conceptualisations of formlessness, and cognitive reflections on connoisseurship, form and formalism have regained currency in current discourses on a transhistorical and transdisciplinary level. It has become clear that an “archaeology of knowledge” about these crucial notions is indispensable in teasing out their critical potential and in productive application of what has also been termed “new formalism” or “post-formalism”. [di più]

This workshop is to explore the relation between relics and architecture. First and foremost, cases of relics physically built into the architectural fabric of churches and chapels will be addressed, such as columns whose capitals have been equipped with relics, triumphal arches or the apse’s semi-dome with relic depositories, “secret chambers” or even foundations and walls fortified by holy material. [di più]