Historical Spaces

Foregrounding the subject of Historical Spaces may seem anachronistic since art historians and others have been dealing with it for a very long time. However, things have changed with the ‘spatial turn’: the notion that spaces are not simply (re)presented in various media, but above all created by these very media, has finally gained acceptance. Nevertheless, great efforts still need to be made, particularly in art history, in order to determine how the understanding and mediatisation of historical space can be methodically analyzed. 
Several projects in the Department Michalsky are dealing with this phenomenon and the methodological problem of how to analyze it by questioning how historical spaces were and are conceived and constructed through media. This applies to digital reconstructions of historical sacred spaces as well as to the deconstruction of historical spaces in texts, images, and maps. These representations seem to provide immediate access to historical spaces, and yet they have their own agenda and historical conditionality, which must be analyzed in order to adequately understand their conceptual and mediatic framework. A specific focus is dedicated to the possibilities and limitations of digital tools. Digital tools for mapping and three-dimensional reconstruction are tested and discussed in regular meetings and public workshops. 

Mapping Sacred Spaces

This project is conducting fundamental research on medieval liturgical spaces in Southern Italy. In addition to collecting data in an innovative database and digitally reconstructing liturgical arrangements that have often been significantly altered, the project also experiments with a range of epistemological tools shared among the humanities, natural sciences, and digital technologies. more

Historical Spaces in Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata (concluded)

This project used Flavio Biondo’s Italia illustrata from the 15th century as an example to examine the spaces that this literary description of Italy creates by combining topographical and historical information from ancient times in a specific syntax. The cognitive-semantic analysis of the text was linked to the examination of historical maps in order to visually process and store the historical spatial knowledge. more

Images of Europe Beyond Europe

In the context of global exchange processes, this research project focuses on ‘other’ images of Europe. This does not refer to images of ‘other’ images circulating in Europe, but to those images of Europe that existed in locally and temporally remote places and continue to exist today.   more