Italy in a Global Context

The Research Priority Italy in a Global Context aims to recast our understanding of Italian early modern and contemporary art by studying artistic developments that occurred outside of the predominantly urban centers of the Italian peninsula. This challenges the paradigm of the centrality of artistic capitals and the subsequent reception of their breakthroughs in subordinate peripheries, proposing instead a pluralistic view with an eye towards a global understanding of art. A specific focus of the section is Latin America and its idiosyncratic reinventions of the Baroque, which builds on previous research on the interactions between Rome and the Viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century, as well as the Latin American actualization and renewal of German-language art theory and historiography in the twentieth century. The Department has built up an open-access collection of 13k photographs documenting 6k items of Latin American art and architecture from precolonial times to the present. 

Furthermore, in relation to the Ventennio fascista, the question of the imperialist aspects of modern architecture, urbanism, and art in the territories occupied by Italy are explored. By means of a comparison of regionalisms in young nations such as Brazil and Argentina, which fought against a Western modernist ‘neocolonialism’, fascist colonial architecture can be observed as regionalist constructions of the Other. Thus, a more complex picture of global Modernisms can contribute to a new political geography of art. The Research Priority includes the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture: From Nation Building to Now and the Max Planck Partner Group Sport, Body, and Race in Fascist Visual Culture.