Department Weddigen
Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context
The construction of Modernity, including the Contemporary, was underpinned by early modern experiments in art and theory. These, conversely, require today’s methodological approaches to be understood and activated anew. Moreover, in the longue durée of the Modern Age, art and its theory became increasingly defined by global, transcultural entanglements. Today’s methodological approaches – from queer, decolonial, to computational – help to address two kinds of challenges. One consists in what, by default, is the meaning of modern and contemporary art. The other is posed by major geopolitical and societal shifts that shape today’s fragmenting reality in its artistic, academic, and planetary dimensions. Thus, studying the history of art, early modern to contemporary, contributes to imagining and securing a livable future. The Department, directed by Tristan Weddigen since 2017, has defined five long-term Research Priorities. In the last three years, Rome Contemporary has become a test field for innovative, integrated, digital research procedures and environments. Materiality and Mediality continues to explore art’s intermedial discourses while Italy in a Global Context divides its attention between Latin American art and architecture on the one hand and Italy’s fascist cultural heritage on the other. The Transnational History of Art History is focused on the edition of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Collected Works and the critical discussion of methodology. Finally, the Department has heavily invested in the emerging field of Digital Visual Studies, both propelling innovation of the Institute’s research infrastructures through the DH Lab and building a dynamic research team that explores the intersection of Art History and Computer Science. As an additional initiative prompted by the geopolitical challenges of the current moment, #ScienceForUkraine has responded to the needs of scholars affected by the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine.
Research Priorities
Rome Contemporary has programmatically expanded the Institute’s scholarly horizon to embrace the history of contemporary art in Rome and Italy, including Artistic Research, and has introduced the contemporary also in the Department’s other Research Priorities.
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The Research Priority
Materiality and Mediality studies art and architecture from the point of view of medium specificity, intermediality, and multimedia contextualization.
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The Research Priority
Italy in a Global Context aims to study art and architecture in a transcultural context, mostly in relation to Latin America, as well as in connection to Italy’s fascist era. It employs a decolonial perspective.
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The Research Priority
Transnational History of Art History both explores the history of methodology at large and is more specifically engaged in the publication of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Collected Writings.
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Digital Visual Studies addresses questions that have arisen from developments in the digital humanities.
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Projects
Art and visual culture contributed extensively to consolidating the process of nation building in modern Italy, which intersects with the policies of colonial expansion of the new Italian State.
This research unit focuses on works of art, images, and objects that actively participated in the development and affirmation of a colonial collective imaginary based on artificial constructions of identity and otherness, orientalisms within and outside of the nation, transnational diplomatic relations and migrations.
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The Max Planck Partner Group
Sport, Body and Race in Fascist Visual Culture aims at investigating how images, objects, works of art, and architectural spaces dedicated to sport played a pivotal role in shaping the imagery of the athletic body, which was intertwined with the fascist regime’s hygienic and racial propaganda.
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The
#ScienceForUkraine initiative is a temporary Research Priority responding to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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Art theory in the years around 1900 explored the foundations of aesthetic production and reception.
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Giovan Pietro Bellori's
The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects published in 1672 is one of the most important and influential source texts of the 17th century. The unbroken research interest proves the undisputed significance of Bellori's writings long appreciated both for its literary complexity and as a source for methodological and art-historiographical research as much as for its documentary qualities.
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Now we have seen is a project dedicated to analysis of the relationship between women and art in 1970s Italy. Taking inspiration from a sentence in the
Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (1970) – “we have been looking for 4000 years: now we have seen!” – the aim of the project is to investigate the phenomenon of women artists’ rising awareness and their need for a change of pace declared through the actions belonging to the semantic field of sight “look at”, “see”, taken as paradigms for a decisive turn from passive to active actions.
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