Events Archive

Plant Plant tra eredità del ventennio e pratiche artistiche in Alto Adige/ Südtirol

Film Seminar
Mettendo in dialogo storia, pratiche curatoriali e pratiche artistiche, il seminario interroga le potenzialità e i limiti delle arti visive nell’indagare, narrare, visualizzare e risignificare la difficile eredità del fascismo in Alto Adige, a partire dal film Plant Plant (2021) dell’artista Katrin Hornek. Intervengono Andrea Di Michele, Emanuele Guidi e Katrin Hornek. [more]

AI & Cities 2024. Digital Double: Situating and Troubling AI Technologies for Architectural Reconstruction and Urban Simulation

Workshop
A double, in the figurative sense, refers to a situation or concept that has two possible interpretations. What happens when we transpose this notion of the double into the digital realm, precisely in the context of a digital transition that affects the way we build, govern, and imagine cities? [more]

Memory Traces: The Intellectual Work of the Line in Leonardo da Vinci’s Drawing Practice

Research Seminar
In this conversation, two experts from the field of Renaissance art history examine drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and uncover a particular workshop practice of the artist. [more]

Stone into Stone

Research Seminar
What does it mean for an artist to transform stone into stone? How do we understand mimesis that eliminates the difference between material and its representation? This lecture examines these questions through the lens of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain (1648-51), focusing on its rocky grotto base hewn from craggy, porous travertine so as to look like the stone itself in its natural state. [more]

An English Alabaster in Aragonese Naples

Research Seminar
In the 15th century, a monumental English alabaster altarpiece of the Passion traveled to Naples, though it was only documented 200 years later. Asking how, where, and why this artwork would have been received in Aragonese Naples, this project explores courtly collecting practices and the tactility of alabaster. [more]

Digital Research Infrastructures for Art History

Workshop
Presentation of recent Initiatives at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris (INHA) with a Lecture of Federico Nurra, Head of the Digital Research Service at INHA. [more]

Scaling Conques – The Frames of Reference in Understanding an 'Abbey in a Shell'

International Conference
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? [more]

Spatial Communities, Cultural Landscape, and Heritage Agnosticism – Reading Day

Workshop
Combining the reading group “Spatial Communities: New Methodologies for Heritage Landscapes” with special guest Christoph Brumann’s work on heritage agnosticism, this one-morning reading workshop aims to connect individual research projects with the most pressing questions in heritage studies today. [more]

Contested Euro-Visions: Universal Value and Global Inequality in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena

Lecture
The UNESCO World Heritage List is a coveted mark of cultural distinction for sites of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). In this talk, Christoph Brumann explains why, despite decades of reform, there is still a North-South imbalance of OUV sites. [more]

The Fabrication of the King: Charles Le Brun Reflecting on the Textile Medium

Semester Opening Lecture
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. [more]

Quo vadis Provenance Research? Primary Sources and Archival Collections in Post-Unitarian Italy

Workshop
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. [more]

Identità plurali e alterità spaziali dell’italianità 1796-1943: territori, città, architetture, musei

Conferenza
Il Convegno Internazionale di Studi si svolge nell’ambito del Progetto di ricerca Spazidentità. Spazialità materiale e immateriale dell’italianità dalla Repubblica Cisalpina al Fascismo : territori, città, architetture, musei. Programmes structurants, École française de Rome, 2022-2026. Axe Thématique : Création, patrimoine, mémoire [more]

The Artificial Eye. Art Theory and Optical Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

Research Seminar
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. [more]

Disintegration and Formation of Medieval Compounds with Towers in Trogir

Lecture
The lecture is focused on studying changes in the Medieval urban fabric, interpreting fragments and their interrelationships, and prompting discussion on the limits of well-argued results and their textual and visual representations. [more]

Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

Conference
In the early modern period, throughout the process of negotiation that gave shape to sainthood – whether officially recognized or aspirational – images were of paramount importance. Encompassing a wide range of media, from inexpensive medals and woodcuts to costly altarpieces, images were as crucial at the grassroots level of popular devotion as in the context of elite patronage. The conference Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism investigates the role of images in generating, defining, and recognizing sainthood across cultures in the wake of Catholicism’s global expansion during the period of Iberian hegemony (c. 1500–1700). [more]

Cultura materiale e immaginario del “Safari” nella “Mostra dell'Attrezzatura Coloniale” (1940)

Research Seminar
Questo seminario analizzerà la "Mostra dell'Attrezzatura Coloniale”, utilizzando i material culture studies e la storia delle esposizioni per indagare il ruolo della cultura materiale nella costruzione dell'immaginario coloniale, in particolare quello che presentava l'invasione dell'Etiopia come un “safari”. [more]

New Fellows’ Presentation

The Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History comprises two departments and two research groups with a great variety of methodological, historical, and geographical perspectives and themes, ranging from “Cities and Spaces in Premodernity” to “Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context”, and from “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” to “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History”. The Institute hosts fellows from diverse regions and backgrounds both at a pre-doc and a post-doc level. [more]

Towards a Novel Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome II

Workshop
The purpose of our 2nd workshop is to focus on co-creation towards a joint product via productive discussions and/or ad-hoc working groups. Possible products include a joint cartography that captures the coverage of available information from antiquity to the present, and a roadmap for the research community. While we provide a foundation, participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas and data! [more]

New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion

In the historiography of the philosopher, mathematician, and Minim theologian Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), 2024 marks 91 years since the publication of the first volume of his Correspondance, 81 years since Robert Lenoble’s trailblazing biography, and 36 years since Peter Dear’s revisionist study of Mersenne and the Jesuit milieu that produced his “deliberately unrevolutionary” scholarship in a rather revolutionary period. [more]

Fabricating the City: Canaletto and 18th Century-Venice

Research Seminar
Textiles are everywhere in the modern city. Flags flutter atop buildings. Awnings stretch over sidewalks. Laundry dangles between houses. Yet the crucial role these fabrics play in urban life has not been properly understood. This research seminar looks to eighteenth-century Venice to uncover the ways in which textiles shaped politics, society, and law in the early-modern metropolis. [more]

The Web of Images

Research Seminar
Covering visual arts and intellectual history, Piotr Ł. Grotowski, an eminent art historian of Byzantium, Central and Eastern Europe, and Olena Derevska, a scholar who specializes in interdisciplinary links, will address the invention of early modern European culture in Ukraine. [more]

Humanist Cultures in Colonial Latin America

Research Seminar
What did it mean to be a humanist in sixteenth. century Tunja? Set in the Colombian Andes, Tunja was construed as a major artistic center of the colonial territory of New Kingdom of Granada by its first-generation of Spanish settlers, which included writers, captains, and clerics. In addition to building new homes and churches, these inhabitants of Tunja established a local intellectual network based on rivalry, innovation, and genealogy. [more]

Window-Shopping with the Avant-Garde: Commercial Display and Modern Design in Interwar Romania

Research Seminar
The relationship between avant-garde artists and consumer culture has often been framed as antagonistic. Nonetheless, in the period between the First and Second World Wars, commercial display became a significant means through which modern design was introduced to the general public. Recent studies have demonstrated how commercial display practices have “contributed to the formulation of new forms of aesthetic experience, as well as art and design typologies” (Lasc et al. 2017: 5). Taking as a case study the Romanian avant-garde movement, this talk examines how the visual realm of retail practices intersected with new trends in art and design, in particular the introduction of modern design for the domestic interior in Bucharest. [more]

Bernini, Materials, and Race

Research Seminar
That bronze and other black stony materials could be – but were not always – signifiers of the black body haunts the art of bronze casting through Cordier and Carpeaux and even to the work of Kehinde Wiley today. This talk looks at the traces of the beginnings of these same debates in the milieu of Gianlorenzo Bernini. [more]

Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions

This conference brings together almost five years of research from the Max Planck Research Group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions.” The Research Group has compared different scientific disciplines of the late medieval and early modern periods, from anatomy to the study of magnetism. [more]

Synthetic Realities, Real Violence: AI and Imaging Tech in Contemporary Conflicts

Research Seminar
Discussing the convergence of artificial intelligence, imaging technologies, and modern conflict, Donatella Della Ratta and Lesia Vasylchenko will explore how AI-driven forms of representation reshape reality and generate new forms of violence. [more]

Geografie, spazi e luoghi della mascolinità e dell'omosessualità nell’Italia fascista

Research Seminar
Questo Research Seminar si focalizzerà su spazi, luoghi e architetture della mascolinità dell’Italia fascista, utilizzando la storia di genere e della sessualità come utile strumento di indagine dei contesti urbani ed extraurbani del periodo. Un focus su tre città in particolare, Roma, Venezia e Catania, permetterà inoltre di articolare questi temi al dialogo tra Nord e Sud, e alle costruzioni di genere associate ai rispettivi immaginari geografici. [more]

Jerusalem in Rome, Constantinople, and Venice: Four Cities and the Idea of a ‘Holy of Holies’

Research Seminar
This seminar is devoted to an exploration of three cities that claimed the title of being a New Jerusalem. More specifically, we will explore aspects of the rise and development of the Christian veneration of saints and relics as a decidedly urban phenomenon in the cities of Constantinople, Rome, and Venice from the late antique to the early modern period. [more]

Sogno e realtà: Italian Orientalist Painting

Research Seminar
The distinction between truth and fantasy has long structured studies of Orientalist painting in the Italian sphere. This lecture explores critical and historiographical blind spots regarding this problematic genre from the nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. [more]

Art in Times of War and Peace: Legacies of Early Modern Loot and Repair

Conference
Art in Times of War and Peace is an international, interdisciplinary conference that addresses the ways in which conflict and its resolution have historically moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period. [more]

“Présences Arabes”. Mapping out Paris as an Arab capital 1908-1988

Research Seminar
Morad Montazami will present and discuss the exhibition he curated, Arab Presences. Modern Art and Decolonization. Paris 1908-1988 (Musée d’art moderne de Paris), as the first attempt to gather a short 20th century global picture and micro-history of Arab artistic trajectories in Paris. [more]

La svolta mediale. Dai mezzi di comunicazione ai processi di mediazione

Research Seminar
Negli ultimi decenni siamo passati dal pensare ai media come mezzi di comunicazione al considerarli come ambienti, poi come infrastrutture, e infine come dispositivi per mediare con il mondo. Ma cosa significa mediare con il mondo? Cercare di appropriarsene o cercare di difendersi da esso? [more]

Champollion before the College de France: a Micro-Historic Inquiry

Research Seminar
The statue of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi for the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Third Republic installed it in the Collège de France. As an expression of the imperial consciousness of world and knowledge, the statue is undermined by its own pictorial programme and refers to problems of French universalism that Champollion himself had already reflected on. [more]

Town and Country: An Ottoman Album of Imperial Sites from 1905

Research Seminar
This seminar centers on a previously unknown photograph album from 1905, whose images constitute the last photographic representations of Yıldız Palace before its wholesale dismantling in 1909 in the aftermath of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s deposition. [more]

Now we have seen. Women and Art in 1970s Italy

Conference
The event represents the final stage of the eponymous project launched by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome in 2022 and concluded with the publication of a collective volume of the same name dedicated to the relationship between art and feminism in 1970s Italy. [more]

Faszination Rom. Maarten van Heemskerck zeichnet die Stadt | The Allure of Rome. Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City

Exhibition
The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin owns two spectacular albums with around 160 drawings by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), executed in Rome between 1532 and 1536/37. During these years he wandered through the city, visited collections of antiquities, made pilgrimages to the holy sites, and filled his sketchbook with drawings. [more]

Ways of Landscape: Jean Epstein’s Film Practice and Theory

Screening (April 23, 2024 at 20:00), International Workshop (April 24, 2024)
What did the eruptive landscape of Mount Etna represent for Jean Epstein – one of the most important personalities of the French avant-garde – when the film company Pathé sent him to film the lava flow in 1923? This workshop aims to reflect on the abundant and continually stimulating questions that come from the intertwining of Epstein’s film practice and visual theory. [more]

Proxy Wooings and Weddings. From Shakespeare to Rubens

Henriette Hertz Lecture
Why does Rubens’s painting of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV lack a portrait of the groom? This paper explores the history of the proxy wedding and the theoretical problems raised by such ceremonies when confronted with expectations of affective bonds between spouses. [more]

Confluenze Digitali: Tutela, valorizzazione, fruizione condivisa del patrimonio artistico aquilano

Conferenza
Accesso, tutela e fruizione di patrimonio culturale dell’Aquila tramite l’aggregazione di dati provenienti da biblioteche, musei, istituti e la loro condivisione su Wikidata. [more]

Alessia Rollo. Visual Narratives of the Italian South

Research Exhibition curated by Viviana Costagliola
Visual Narratives of the Italian South features a selection of archival materials from the Archivio Franco Pinna (Roma) in dialogue with works from Alessia Rollo’s Parallel Eyes project. The exhibition is part of Viviana Costagliola's postdoctoral research project “Viaggio al Sud” The Representation of Southern Italy in Photographic Reportage and Tourism Promotion Photography after World War II, supported by the Michalsky department. [more]

Domes of Byzantium under a Gallic Sky: Uses and Receptions of Neo-Byzantine Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France

Research Seminar
Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and other French cities are still today dominated by churches whose architecture recalls a long-vanished empire: Byzantium. Why mobilize such architectural imaginaries for some of the country’s most iconic buildings? [more]

«Post Scriptum» | Grégory Sugnaux – Solo Exhibition

Research Exhibition curated by Lara Demori
Art Fellow Grégory Sugnaux presents the corpus of works he has produced during his residency at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, delving into the archives, the photographic collection, and the library. Resulting from the project “Shape-Shifting: Transfiguring Art History”, Sugnaux’s solo show will take place on the ground floor of Palazzo Zuccari, yet it will include media material recorded at the “La Cage aux Folles”, a former showroom at the beginning of the 20th century that became a Club in the 1970s.Pursuing the legacy of Aby Warburg’s Iconology, Sugnaux’s project aims to rethink art history through images that mediate between high, popular, and punk culture. [more]

Tricontinental Circulations: Visual Politics and Transnational Struggles

Research Seminar
With the First Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966), the efforts of the revolutionary Cuban government were ratified with the configuration of a transnational movement of resistance and solidarity in the Global South (that included Latin America, Africa and Asia). The Tricontinental built an effective visual apparatus via cinema, photography as well as poster production that integrated the struggles of the three continents, creating an imagined community connecting revolutions around the world (from Vietnam to Central America and Nicaragua). [more]

Constantinople Modern: Avant-Garde Arts in Occupied Istanbul, 1918-1923

Research Seminar
This talk explores modernist painters, writers, and musicians active in Istanbul during the city’s occupation by British, French, and Italian forces between 1918 and 1923, asking how foreign occupation and the international cultural climate of the period contributed to the creation of an avantgarde. [more]

Shoptalks

In this one-day event, fellows share insights and findings from the research projects they are undertaking at the Bibliotheca Hertizana. [more]

Rocks, Branches, Bones and Folds: Beyond the Surface of Early Modern Drapery

Research Seminar
Drapery – characterised by its folds and by its relationship to the human body – emerged as a distinct visual element in the practice and theory of early modern art. As this seminar demonstrates, drapery was highly malleable both in its form and in its capacity to take on meaning in the visual realm, and was thus a particular representational challenge for the artist, as well as a site of expression and virtuosity. [more]

Cult/Space/Presence of Images. A Workshop on the Art and Cultural Historical Impulses of Hans Belting

Conference
The aim of this workshop, a sequel to the one held last year in Brno, is to further illuminate and classify the contribution of Hans Belting (1935–2023) to art history, visual and cultural studies and to reflect on its significance. [more]

Giovanni Testori fra teatro e critica d’arte. Quando il lavoro del critico trapassa nell’invenzione del vero scrittore

Research Seminar
Narratore, poeta, critico d’arte e pittore. Drammaturgo, regista e anche attore. Giovanni Testori è stato un autore complesso e prolifico, di cui rimane ancora molto da approfondire. Il seminario offre un’occasione per indagare la connessione tra il Testori drammaturgo e il critico d’arte, partendo dalle riflessioni teoriche sul teatro contenute nel saggio del 1968 “Il ventre del teatro”. [more]

In-Between: the Scylla and Charybdis of Official and non-official in the Late Soviet Epoch

Research Seminar
The discussion of Soviet culture often revolves around triggering division into the official and the non-official, which simplifies our knowledge about the distribution of images at that period, omitting their existence in-between the extremities of allowed and forbidden. The research seminar will address these problematic dichotomies on the materials of different realms across the former Soviet space — from architecture to photography. [more]

Mediterranean Paths for Architecture. Malta and the European Community of the Order of Saint John

Research Seminar
The cosmopolitan context of the Maltese archipelago, its community and its architecture, offer privileged examples of the international circulations of knowledge, models, and ideas of architecture in early modern Europe. [more]

«Romano nell’animo e nel volto». Il paradigma del Duce

Research Seminar
Mussolini fu assimilato a molti grandi personaggi della Roma antica. Ma egli apparve soprattutto come la reincarnazione stessa del tipo romano. Nelle arti e nelle parole scritte e pronunciate, il Duce era la presenza rassicurante del genio della stirpe millenaria nell’Italia fascista. [more]

Brazilian Art and the Return to Painting in the 1980s

Research Seminar
Reviewing the samba school processions during the 1987 carnival in Rio de Janeiro, art critic Frederico Morais cited Achille Bonito Oliva. The Italian art critic and curator had been in Brazil only a few days before, and caused outrage with certain derisory comments about the local culture; notably, that Brazilian art was inextricably associated with samba. [more]

Gernsheim Study Days: Exploring Rome through Drawing in the 16th Century

Gernsheim Study Days
In 1532, the painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) set out on a journey from Haarlem to Rome. A collection of 94 sheets with about 160 drawings in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett provides a visual testimony to his five-year stay – it is one of the most extensive by an artist traveling to Rome in the 16th century. [more]

Datathink 2024 / AI & Cities: Sampling the Past, Interpreting the Present in Future Tense

Winter school exploring emerging intersections of artificial intelligence, machine learning, urban studies, urban landscape, and architectural and urban history. [more]

Art and Feminism in Italy in the 1970s

Field Seminar
As part of the Italian Council 11 project Now We Have Seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy, a thematic tour is organized at the exhibition Cooking Cleaning Caring. Care Work in the Arts since 1960, held at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop in cooperation with the Institute of Art History at the Ruhr University Bochum and curated by Linda Walther and Friederike Sigler with Monja Drossmann and Tonia Andresen. [more]

From Caste to Kant? Göttingen's Enlightenment Racial Scientists and the 'Mestizos' of Peru

Research Seminar – Kant Jubilee 2024
What links an Inca princess to Immanuel Kant, and the son of a disgraced Peruvian conquistador to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach? On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Kant's birth in 2024, this seminar traces how Iberian ideas of 'mixing' influenced German racial thinking in the crucial Enlightenment period. [more]

Presentazione del catalogo della mostra Hilde in Italia. Arte e Vita nelle fotografie di Hilde Lotz-Bauer

Presentazione libro
Il Museo di Roma in Trastevere ospita, mercoledì 14 febbraio alle ore 18.30, la presentazione del catalogo della mostra edito da Gangemi editore e realizzato grazie al sostegno della Bibliotheca Hertziana e del Kunsthistorisches Institut of Florenz.Il volume, curato da Federica Kappler e Corinna Lotz, presenti con gli altri autori Ute Dercks, Alessio De Stefano, Johannes Röll e Regine Schallert, è presentato da Nicoletta Leonardi. Modera la conversazione Tanja Michalsky, Bibliotheca Hertziana. [more]

Il colore nella cultura e nell’arte medievale: teorie, fonti, materiali (1100–1250)

Research Seminar
Il colore nella cultura pre-moderna è a tutti gli effetti un “oggetto culturale”. Valutarne il ruolo nella cultura e nell’arte del Medioevo significa innanzitutto avere a che fare con questioni e problemi che interessano linguistica, la scienza, l’estetica e la teologia, oltre che la trattatistica tecnica. [more]

New Fellows’ Presentation

The Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History comprises two departments and two research groups with a great variety of methodological, historical, and geographical perspectives and themes, ranging from “Cities and Spaces in the Middle Ages” to “Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context”, and from “Visualising Science in Media Revolution” to “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History”. The Institute hosts fellows from diverse regions and backgrounds both at a pre-doc and a post-doc level. [more]

The Worksite in the 16th Century: Architecture and Decoration. Fontainebleau

International Study Seminar
The seminar will examine the case of the decoration at the Château of Fontainebleau, a central episode in 16th-century artistic culture in Europe, within the framework of the international research project I cantieri in Europa nel Cinquecento: architettura e decorazione, now at its second stage after the session on Rome held in 2019. Seventy years after the exhibition Fontainebleau e la Maniera italiana (Naples 1952), it is time to return to the artistic relations between Italy and France from the point of view of this important matter, examining the transmission of techniques, languages, artists, craftsmen, and its consequences in both directions. [more]

The Missing Archive: Bauhaus Artists and Designers and the Holocaust

Research Seminar
While Bauhaus after 1933 is remembered as a movement in exile, this works-in-progress talk explores the work of three Bauhäusler who were caught up in the National-Socialists’ carceral system and who, until now, have been lost to art history. [more]

Art Against Politics

Film screening with discussion
Does art have an effect on non-artistic reality and, if so, to what degree can art shape society and politics? The documentary, "Art Against Politics", provides an array of answers to these questions. [more]

Max Peiffer Watenphul: Photography and the Queer Bauhaus!

Lecture
The photographs of Max Peiffer Watenphul, the Bauhaus’s first known queer member, capture campy portraits of his Bauhaus friends, scenes of queer desire, and cityscapes in Italy, where he first traveled as a Rome Prize recipient and later as an exile. [more]

Säulen versus Autos, 1921-1980

Vortrag
In einer später sehr berühmt gewordenen Bildkonfrontation ließ Le Corbusier 1921 Autos auf antike Tempel prallen. Diese gewollte Kollision von Dynamik und Statik sollte die Architekturdiskussionen des 20. Jahrhunderts weit über die Moderne hinaus prägen. [more]

New Leisure for a New Nation. Art and Entertainment in Italy, from Nation-building to Liberation (1861-1945)

Workshop
The aim of the workshop is to analyze how the relationship between artistic representations and new forms of entertainment contributed to the construction of Italian identities during the nation-building process. Particular emphasis will be placed on aspects related to gender, the exhibited and spectacularised body, race and colonial dynamics, as well as regionalisms and the social and class differences that entertainment has contributed to normalising and/or transgressing. [more]

Art History in Conversation with Conservation: The Mysterious Case of David Bailly’s Portrait of a Painter with Vanity Symbols

Part of the research seminar series 'Conserving Histories of Art'
David Bailly’s Portrait of a Painter with Vanity Symbols, signed and dated 1651, has provided us with a rich history of interpretation. Despite scholars’ different approaches and theories, it is generally understood as a painted autobiography in which there has been sustained reflection on the relationship between visibility and invisibility, between figure and ground. [more]

Medieval Architecture as “Protean Mechanism”: Robert Willis and the Technics of Architectural History

Research Seminar
What would it mean to understand a medieval church as industrial technology? Rather than a passing theory of our own moment, this idea was actually lodged deep in the discipline of architectural history as it emerged in 19th century Britain. [more]

Shoptalks

In this one-day event, the fellows of the Bibliotheca Hertziana present their research projects. [more]

A Day in Honour of Ursula Nilgen – and her Foundation for Italian Medieval Studies at the Bibliotheca Hertziana

This study day honors the memory of art historian Ursula Nilgen with presentations from international scholars that have taken up her research proposals. In this context we will present the Foundation established in her name at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. [more]

Ursula’s Tourist Imaginary

Research Seminar
This talk will explore the German artist Ursula Schultze-Bluhm’s art in relation to her experiences travelling in the post-war world and her construction in surrealist painting and writing of a ‘tourist imaginary’. [more]

The Art of Decolonization

Research Seminar
Focusing on the years of decolonization, this presentation will develop a transnational and transhistorical study of the artistic and diplomatic exchanges between France and Senegal from the 1950 to 1970s. [more]

Drawing Comparisons: Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900

Conference
The history of art and the practice of anatomy have long depended upon similar acts of comparison: identifying, visualizing and describing likenesses. This workshop investigates the role of images in developing comparative anatomy — the study of anatomy across species — in early modern Europe. [more]

Nuove fonti documentarie su Ludwig Pollak, un protagonista del mercato internazionale dell'arte nella prima metà del '900

Research Seminar
L’archeologo, connoisseur e mercante d’arte praghese Ludwig Pollak (1868–1943) è stato uno dei principali protagonisti del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo a Roma tra la fine del XIX secolo e i primi decenni del Novecento. [more]

Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy | Mauro Staccioli: Consolidare un’eredità artistica

Research exhibition curated by Marica Antonucci
Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy | Mauro Staccioli: Consolidare un’eredità artistica (18 October 2023 – 19 January 2024) examines the work of Mauro Staccioli through a selection of archival materials. The exhibition is curated by Marica Antonucci. [more]

Scultura italiana dal secondo dopoguerra agli anni Ottanta

Workshop
Il workshop “Scultura italiana dal dopoguerra agli anni Ottanta” — in occasione della mostra “Mauro Staccioli: Cementing a Legacy” presso Bibliotheca Hertziana — mira ad approfondire aspetti meno studiati e controversi della scultura italiana del secondo dopoguerra, prendendo come punto di partenza l’opera di Mauro Staccioli in tutte le sue sfaccettature. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (7th Research Seminar): Mandrake. A Natural History of Image Making

Research Seminar
Mandrakes mark the boundary of nature and art. They were coveted objects for medicine, natural history, magic and collections. Supposedly, these human-like roots grow naturally. However, in the early modern period, it was also common knowledge that they were often faked. [more]

Generic Pastness. AI Image Synthesis and the Virtualization of the Archive

Research Seminar
AI image synthesis models are turning large collections of historical images into resources for producing new visual content. How does this affect our view of the past, and what does it mean for image archives to become sites of pattern extraction? [more]

Media Histories of Sculpture

Workshop
As Marshall McLuhan argued in his seminal Understanding Media, the “hybridizing or compounding” of media “offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties.” This workshop seeks to explore sculpture’s intermedial entanglements and asks what these may reveal about the medium of sculpture. [more]

Memorie coloniali e Nation Building. Italia e Germania a confronto

Convegno
L’Europa ha fatto realmente i conti con la sua storia coloniale? Italia e Germania, protagonisti tardivi della scramble for Africa, hanno davvero prodotto colonialismi minori? E oggi questi due paesi come si confrontano con quel passato, in che modo agiscono sulla memoria discorsiva e visuale, partecipando alla costruzione della loro narrazione nazionale? [more]

Art and Matronage: G. E. Street, the ‘Buffalo Girls’, and the Gothic Revival between London and Rome

Research Seminar
Are the achievements of the Gothic Revival in the Victorian period solely attributable to men? The different and not so obvious ways in which other types of agency exerted influence over the design process should give us pause for thought. [more]

Giorgio de Chirico and the Modern Literary Imagination

Lecture
A painter poet and a poet’s painter, Giorgio de Chirico arguably influenced the 20th century literary imagination more than any other modernist artist. This lecture considers why his art entranced the American poets John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand. [more]

Giulio Romano - Intorno a un disegno della Collezione Hertz

Research Exhibition
This research exhibition focuses on one of Giulio Romano's preparatory drawings for the famous fresco cycle created for the great hall of the Villa Lante on the Janiculum Hill, today preserved in Palazzo Zuccari. The recent restoration of the drawing The Liberation of Cloelia (in the collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana) has provided an opportunity to highlight the special appreciation for Italian Renaissance art of Henriette Hertz, cosmopolitan collector, and the founder of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. [more]

Italianisms in Soviet Architecture of the Thaw Era

Research Seminar
How do we trace architectural connections between two countries in the deeply interconnected and mazed twentieth-century world? The new look at the archival data can enrich our understanding of the workings of the architectural profession in the Cold War period. [more]

Past and Present Representations of Historical Urban Spaces (Middle Ages – Early Modern Times)

Workshop
Historic cities are reconstructed and represented in numerous different projects around the world, whereby the hermeneutics of the procedure are not addressed enough. This workshop aims to discuss historical representations of urban spaces (in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern times) in comparison with the representations of these spaces in digital art history, focusing on the relationships between precision and interpretation. [more]

From Leeuwenhoek to the Electron Microscope

Lecture
Join us for a discussion and Q&A with Professor Katharine Cashman FRS, Professor Matthew Cobb, and Dr Dirk van Miert to celebrate Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the development of microscopy to the present day. [more]

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) and His Impact on the History of Microscopy

International Conference
Three hundred years ago the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek died. He had been corresponding with the Royal Society for fifty years. Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in the Netherlands in 1632, developed himself into one of the most prolific early microscopists. He made his own lenses and small hand-held microscopes which were more versatile than most other devices at the time. With these instruments and his outstanding preparation and observation techniques, he was the first to see and describe red blood cells, bacteria and many other things. [more]

The 34th ACM Hypertext Conference 2023: Hypertext and Social Media

Conference
The ACM Hypertext conference is a premium venue for high-quality research on all aspects of modern hypertext research: social and intelligent media, narrative systems, authoring, reading and publishing hypertext, workflows and infrastructures. [more]

Hertziana App Release

Presentation
Discover the Bibliotheca Hertziana with new eyes! On July 10, 2023, the Hertziana app will be released, enabling you to immerse yourself in the Institute's buildings, furnishings and architectural decoration through novel augmented reality technology. [more]

Mappare lo spazio sacro: dal frammento al contesto (Italia, XI-XIV sec.)

Convegno
Ripensare e ricostituire idealmente lo spazio sacro medievale costituisce una tappa epistemologica obbligata se si vogliono comprendere a fondo gli scenari entro i quali sono stati performati i riti e i contesti per i quali sono stati concepiti gli oggetti. [more]

Towards a Multi-Resolution Archaeology: Reframing the Role of 3D Models in the Study of Ancient Space

Research Seminar
This talk will discuss theoretical and methodological aspects related to 3D modelling in archaeology and cultural heritage, drawing upon a selection of case studies from Pompeii, where emerging techniques including VR-based Eye-Tracking and 3D GIS have been introduced. [more]

Early Modern Poland-Lithuania and the Spectre of Orientalism

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Elena Subach: Hidden

Research Exhibition
A research exhibition of photographic works by Ukrainian artist Elena Subach. The featured series was created in spring 2022 when museum workers and volunteers all over the country rushed to protect cultural heritage in the wake of the escalation of the Russian military aggression. From April 20-July 3, 2023 [more]

Artists as Futurists? On the History of Durability in Art and the Making of the Future

Research Seminar
Why did artists want to make objects they hoped would last a long time? And why did their patrons want to own long-lasting works of art? This talk will give an introduction to Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts (DURARE), a project funded by the European Research Council. [more]

Observing and Thinking through Drawing

Workshop
In this workshop we explore practices of drawing as an act of observing the world. With examples from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries we will discuss the traces of thinking, learning and observation that we can find in drawings by artists and scientific practitioners. [more]

Towards a Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome

Workshop
The purpose of the workshop is to explore the state-of-the-art and the joint emerging opportunities towards a perhaps radically novel, collaborative, and multidisciplinary understanding of the city of Rome, as imagined, represented, and enacted in historical sources and modern data. [more]

Now we have seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy

Workshop
A thematic and methodological comparison between the participants and with the public preparatory to the publication of the homonymous collective volume, scheduled for spring 2024, dedicated to the relationship between art and feminism in 1970s Italy. [more]

Il lavoro in città VII: Essere donne (Cecilia Mangini, 1964)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Scraping the Surface: Mezzotint and the Delicate Matter of Skin in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Part of the research seminar series 'Conserving Histories of Art'
Made by rocking a toothed blade across a plate thousands of times to create a delicate burred surface and then scraping or burnishing the burrs to create tonal gradations, the mezzotint – both as matrix and print – is notoriously fragile. [more]

From the Street to the Museum and Back to the Street…

Research Seminar
A seminar led by Hou Hanru, on the interaction between artistic interventions in the urban space and the evolution of the institution. Contemporary art has a powerful and perpetual “tradition” of negotiating with the boundary between real life and art, between everyday space and institutional frameworks. [more]

Time As Form and Movement in Medieval Diagrams

Research Seminar
Located between the sensory and the imaginative, the quadrivium of musica, cosmology, arithmetic, and geometry was nonetheless grounded in the realm of the visual. In manuscripts, time and eternity appear as diagrams, graphs, and line drawings using parchment, ink, and pigments. [more]

Gnoseology, Aesthesis, Decoloniality

Lecture
In this lecture, Prof. W.D. Mignolo will address the themes of decolonization and artistic practices, at the invitation of Museo delle Civiltà’s research fellow DAAR – Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. The lecture is promoted as part of the collaboration between Museo delle Civiltà and the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Research Unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture. [more]

Shoptalks

In the Shoptalks, the Fellows of the Bibliotheca Hertziana present their Research Projects. [more]

Art as Project, Project as Art: Antonio Dias and Painting after Conceptual Art

Research Seminar
In this research seminar, Sérgio B. Martins explores two competing notions of project that informed Antonio Dias's painting in the early 1970s, one relating to the unfinished project as a subgenre of Conceptual art and the other to Italian debates apropos of the crisis of the historicity of modern art. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (6th Research Seminar): Whose 'Reality'? Art, Philosophy and Ideology in the ČSSR, 1948-1978

Research Seminar
Departing from Karel Teige’s essay Realism, the lecture first examines how the so-called non-conformist artists and philosophers in the ČSSR problematized and deconstructed the highly disputed notion of ‘reality’. [more]

From Late Medieval to Early Modern Love Boxes

Research Seminar
They “used to have, in their rooms, great wooden chests in the form of sarcophagi. . . and there were none that did not have the said chests painted. . .” [more]

Rome 10th Century

Conference
The conference aims to draw the attention of the scientific community to the history and history of art in Rome during the 10th century, to fill the many existing historiographical and methodological gaps. [more]

Il lavoro in città VI: Adua e le compagne (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Art and Power School

International Workshop
The Art and Power School is part of the Project Art and Power: Decolonizing Art History, which addresses the need to identify and analyze visual regimes and to critically reflect on the construction of power as a strategy of social dominance. [more]

The Notion of Renaissance, Between History and Myth. Origins, Transformations, New-Perspectives

Conference
The conference will explore the many ways the concept of the Renaissance has been viewed over the centuries, with a focus on the key figures, artistic practices and paradigms that have helped keep it alive for five hundred years. [more]

Imperial Games: Visuality, Tactility and Synaesthesia

Research Seminar
This research seminar examines the role of boardgames, toys and optical devices in the construction of an imperial subjectivity in the nineteenth century. [more]

Tessere le stagioni

Conferenza
Cogliendo l’occasione del completamento del restauro degli arazzi allegorici della Primavera e dell’Autunno, che furono tessuti all’inizio del XVII secolo nell’atelier della famiglia Raes riprendendo dei disegni di Francesco Salviati, il convegno Tessere le Stagioni intende approfondire lo studio di questi arazzi – la loro storia, fortuna e iconografia – e indagare altresì una serie di tematiche legate ai processi creativi, alla circolazione e serialità dei motivi, alla materialità e alle pratiche conservative. [more]

Domus Aurea in 1775 and 'Risposta dell'Architecto Vincenzo Brenna'

Research Seminar
In spring 1775 Roman Architect Vincenzo Brenna (1741–1820) published his answer to a critic that can be read as a short statement of his understanding of Roman antiquity and the way it should be treated. The seminar will investigate various contexts of this publication. [more]

Marks of Music: Sound and Visualization in the Early Modern Period

Workshop
“Marks of Music: Sound and Visualization in the Early Modern Period” is an interdisciplinary workshop on the manifold uses and trajectories of notating and visualizing music in the early modern period. [more]

Artisti latinoamericani in Italia

Research Seminar
A partire dalla seconda metà del XIX secolo, l'attrazione delle accademie italiane, il fascino della tradizione artistica e la disponibilità di botteghe e maestri, determinarono l'inizio di un flusso migratorio irregolare di giovani artisti dagli Stati latinoamericani di recente formazione, che desideravano consolidarne il tessuto culturale e costruire una difficle identità nazionale. [more]

Colour matters: New approaches to chromatic materiality: the ERC project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2024)

Research Seminar
The ERC project CHROMOTOPE focuses on the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in Victorian England, then in the vanguard of the industrial revolution. [more]

Gernsheim Study Days: Accident or Strategy. The Collecting of Drawings in 16th and 17th Century Italy

With the overriding question of whether collectors purchased strategically or amassed drawings by accident, the Gernsheim Study Days at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in May 2023 will examine the full breadth of this early moment in the history of collecting works on paper. [more]

'Taio dorado': On Wood and Gold in Fifteenth-Century Venice

Research Seminar
In the Hebrew bible, carved wooden form and hammered gold surface are the very stuff of skillful fabrication; wood overlaid with pure gold honoured the Holy of Holies and Solomonic rule. Thinking wood and gold together, this exploratory paper will address the many kinds of work – religious, political, economic and aesthetic – that this apparently pragmatic pairing was put to use in Quattrocento Venice, a republic in which sites, things and institutions proliferated as ‘golden’. [more]

From the Epic Poem to the Postcolonial History of Art, Fragments of a Reflection

Research Seminar
Starting from the film Notes for an African Orestes (1970) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elvan Zabunyan proposes a reflection in the form of a comparative analysis between the epic poem, colonial history, and postcolonial emancipation in the arts, traveling between the African continent, the Caribbean region and Europe. [more]

Mapping Entanglements of Art, Animal Furs, and Unfree Persons Between the Early Modern Baltic and Italy: the Case of Late Seicento Lithuania and Tuscany

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Rinascimento visionario: Giovanni di Paolo tra i surrealisti

Research Seminar
L’intervento intende ricomporre la fortuna critica e la memoria visiva di un artista senese del Quattrocento in ambito surrealista: dalle pagine della rivista «Documents» alla mostra Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism al MoMA di New York, l’interesse crescente per la pittura ‘eccentrica’ di Giovanni di Paolo è esemplare dell’osmosi che esiste tra storiografia e arte moderna e interroga le dinamiche che definiscono questo scambio in termini di riscoperta critica, appropriazione culturale, intertestualità visiva. [more]

Medieval Art in Georgia through the Soviet Lens: from Colonialist Marginalization to Nationalist Acclamation

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Il lavoro in città V: Una donna libera (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1954)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Nicola Pisano in Colour

Research Seminar
The material evidence gathered in recent years during the cleaning, technical examination and conservation of sculptural works by Nicola Pisano and his pupils and collaborators has revealed much about their experimentation with different materials. [more]

‘Mental Spinning’: The Female Craft of Thought in the Dutch Republic

Research Seminar
Images of women bend over needlework were popular in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century as exemplars of obedience and housewifery duty. Hanneke Grootenboer argues that in the context of the early modern debate on women’s education (also referred to as the querelle des femmes), these images should also be understood as portrayals of female thinking—the pictorial equivalent of the melancholy male philosopher—and the act of needlework they represent, as a moment of subversion and escape. [more]

Exhibitions and Exhibitionism: Art in Public Spaces

Research Seminar
In this thought-provoking lecture, international artist Luis Camnitzer (born 1937) challenges the notion of art in public spaces and highlights its drawbacks. [more]

Christoph Keller: Data Error – Roma Antichità

Research Exhibition
From February 16 until April 14, 2023, the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome will host the exhibition Data Error – Roma Antichità by visual and conceptual artist Christoph Keller. Data Error – Roma Antichità is a series of framed digital collages installed on exhibition walls under the Mannerist frescos of Palazzo Zuccari. [more]

Immortal Egypt. The Afterlife of Egypt in Early Modern Visual Arts

Conference
These study days will question the complex interaction between continuity, discontinuity, survival and rebirth by employing the epistemological tools of art history, visual anthropology and the history of ideas in order to reflect on the heritage, as well as on the creative processes that have ensured the posterity of a strange, complex, changing, close and distant Antiquity. [more]

Entangled Spaces in Mid 20th Century Rome: The Cinema Screen and the Lived Places of Social Housing

The ambitious projects of social housing built during Italy’s fascist regime became intricately connected to the experimental cinematic production that the regime supported. How does this relation speak to our own worries about the precariousness of shared urban environments? [more]

Il lavoro in città IV: Roma ore 11 (Giuseppe De Santis, 1952)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (5th Research Seminar): Modernist Studies Then and Now: Critical Genealogies and Contemporary Possibilities

Research Seminar
In this talk Hal Foster looks back at the last few decades of modernist studies from a personal perspective, touching on the challenges of both contemporary art and decolonial critique. He also considers how ideas of modernism might be bound up with models of modernity that are both problematic and outdated. [more]

Il lavoro in città III: La valigia dei sogni (Luigi Comencini, 1953)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Portraits and Pathologies. Likenesses and Clinical Pictures in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Research Seminar
This lecture engages with relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. It will argue that definitions and practices of portraiture evolving around the notion of character were crucial for the development of the pathological image meant to capture the ‘characteristic traits’ of a disease. [more]

Second Sex, Gender Check and the Feminist Avant-Garde

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Perceptions of Aging and Old Age: Thresholds and Life-Cycles

Conference
Images of old age and aging determine how we handle demographic change. This conference will explore how the stages of the life cycle have been construed throughout history in order to consciously recognize the stereotypes that emanate from these age categories. [more]

Transient Photographs: How Time Reshapes the Photographic Archive

Lecture
Since the early 19th century, photography has offered a method to fix the fleeting image. Since then, however, we have become aware of the transient character of all photographic materials. [more]

Gray Zones in Black and White: Bauhaus Photography Under Nazism

Lecture
Most histories of the Bauhaus after 1933 describe it as a movement in exile, but the majority of Bauhäusler remained in Germany. This talk focuses on two of its communist photographers who took very different paths of resistance and participation during the Nazi period. [more]

Wastework

Conference
Wastework is an international, interdisciplinary conference on the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in the early modern workshop. It proposes to examine acts of disposal, displacement, removal, and abeyance – in short, the getting rid of unwanted things – and the consequences these carry for the study of early modern material culture. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 5

Art History in Ukraine, Now: A Workshop with Getty x Hertziana Grantees
Short presentations of current research in art history conducted by Ukrainian scholars supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories and the Bibliotheca Hertziana. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 4

Research Seminar
The fourth research seminar dedicated to the history of Ukrainian art will cover some aspects of contemporary art discourses in Ukraine. Tetiana Kochubinska and Natalia Matsenko, who work both as researchers and curators, will share their perspectives on the development of media art in Ukraine after the 1990s, and the artistic reflection of social shifts in the country that began in 2014. [more]

Il lavoro in città II: Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Luciano Emmer, 1952)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Media Involution and Political Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England

Research Seminar
Over sixty years ago, Curt Bühler, curator of rare books at the Morgan Library, mused, “The fifteenth century, it may well be said, was one of the most curious and confused periods in recorded history. Not the least curious and confusing of its aspects is the story of the book production in that century.” While Bühler was reflecting on the impact of print, his comments apply well to England’s situation, which, for the most part of the fifteenth century, remained unrocked by any media revolutions. [more]

Il tempo della terracotta

Part of the research seminar series 'Conserving Histories of Art'
Taking a broad chronological approach, this seminar reflects on some of the main moments in terracotta’s critical reception in the modern age. In literary judgements and collecting alike, terracotta seems more than other materials to have passed from the background to the fore of art history several times within the space of a few centuries. [more]

Image Systems and Urban Spatio-Temporal Navigation

Lecture
Image Systems, a novel formalism that allows for the conversion of digital image collections into structured datasets, prioritizing the relationship between images rather than metadata. This approach is fruitful in urban spatiotemporal navigation and automated discovery techniques for the digital humanities. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 3

Research Seminar
The third research seminar in the series of meetings dedicated to the history of Ukrainian art will be dedicated to its late-Soviet period. Polina Baitsym and Oksana Trypolska will elaborate on the fused nature of official and non-official aspects in the functioning of art practices of that time. [more]

Aktivierung. Strategien der Inszenierung mobiler Kunstwerke in der hispanischen Welt der Frühen Neuzeit

Tagung
Mit der temporären Aktivierung von Kunstwerken in der hispanischen Welt widmet sich die Tagung einem Phänomen, das bis in unsere Gegenwart hinein eine zentrale Rolle für die Vermittlung von Glaubenswahrheiten und die Manifestation politischer Macht spielt. [more]

Neobaroque Modern: Oscar Niemeyer and the Construction of a Brazilian Identity

Spring Term Opening Lecture
The lecture explores the reuse of the colonial Baroque in the modernist discourse, and more specifically in Oscar Niemeyer’s early architectural work, as a means to forming Brazilian identity. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 2

Research Seminar
"(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art" is a series of meetings by Ukrainian scholars to give a panoramic overview of the key episodes in the history of the country’s visual heritage. The second research seminar by Svitlana Rybalko and Oksana Barshynova will address the entangled history of Ukrainian art of the early 20thcentury. [more]

Connected Constellations. Networks of Artistic and Political Solidarity with Chile

Workshop
In light of recent studies on artistic and political solidarity movements, this workshop proposes to connect a series of practices that emerged in the Euro-American context during the 1970s and 1980s. The starting point for this reflection is situated in Chile during the period of Augusto Pinochet's civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) and takes into consideration its historical, political and cultural precedents. [more]

Il lavoro in città I: Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)

Ciclo di Film Seminars
Con l’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, la ripresa degli studi di Cinecittà come luogo della produzione coincide con il racconto cinematografico del suo stesso impatto come macchina dello spettacolo. Allo stesso tempo Roma, con la sua espansione urbanistica e trasformazione edilizia, continua a essere esplorata sebbene in discontinuità con l’esperienza neorealista. Gli studi di via Tuscolana, le scalinate di Piazza di Spagna, le consolari che collegano il centro con le aree più periferiche, il nuovo Ponte Marconi, sono solo alcuni dei luoghi di Roma resi iconici e animati dalle reti affettive e sociali attivate dal racconto filmico di questo decennio. [more]

Foreign Travelers and Urban Mobility. Understanding the Three Ecologies of Early Modern Rome

Research Seminar
Although wandering in Rome was a common activity among its visitors, French travelers were unique in developing a distinct philosophical discourse on walking, inspired by the rebuilding of Paris. This conference traces their itineraries through texts and images that analyze Rome’s transformations between the 16th and the 18th centuries. It investigates their role in constructing Rome’s modern image through the physical engagement with its material, natural, and social environments. [more]

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”

3. Research Seminar: "The Eastern European Body"
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Ringvorlesung: "Entangled Art Histories" – Objekte-Narrative-Diskurse (vom 26.10.2022 bis 26.01.2023

Lecture
Der Anspruch, die Kunstgeschichte global zu erweitern, stellt das Fach seit geraumer Zeit in methodischer, inhaltlicher und institutioneller Hinsicht vor große Herausforderungen. Dies tritt etwa mit Blick auf die Öffnung des Gegenstandsbereichs auf außereuropäische Objekte deutlich zutage. Im Zuge dieses Prozesses gilt es, sich folgendem Fragenhorizont zu stellen: Inwiefern ist das an mitteleuropäischen Artefakten erprobte Methoden- und Theorienrepertoire einer global ausgeweiteten Kunstgeschichte noch dienlich? Wie kann die Kunstgeschichtsschreibung vermeiden, vermeintlich längst überwundene koloniale Rhetoriken und Strategien zu reaktivieren? Auf welche Weise lässt sich ästhetische Alterität erfassen, ohne „Andersartigkeit“ zugleich kategorisch festzuschreiben? [more]

Nunc est caro Christi. Images, Inscriptions, and the Making of the Eucharist

Research Seminar
Three pieces produced in Germany in the early 13th century for the Abbey of St. Trudpert present a very rich set of images and inscriptions that reveal a singular vision of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and an original approach to sacramental theology in general. [more]

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”

2. Research Seminar: “An Encounter of the Opposites: Images of Russia in European Renaissance Writing and the Russian Responses”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Fumetti underground tra ricerca e festival mainstream

Workshop
Questo Workshop pone a tema diverse tendenze storiche e contemporanee del fumetto underground, riunendo prospettive di ricerca accademica, attività creativa e divulgazione attraverso eventi culturali di portata nazionale e internazionale. Contenitore elastico, il fumetto underground indica sia una categoria estetica adatta ad esprimere diverse istanze autoriali (genere e tradizione di riferimento sul piano narrativo e visuale, esplorazione di determinati contenuti, stilistica), che una serie di pratiche di produzione e distribuzione alternative alla stampa istituzionale che esercitano una sostanziale influenza sul mondo del fumetto mainstream. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 1

Research Seminar
"(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art" is a series of meetings by Ukrainian scholars to give a panoramic overview of the key episodes in the history of the country’s visual heritage. The first research seminar by Stefania Demchuk and Nazar Kozak will give insight into the issues connected with the study of Medieval and early Modern art in Ukraine. [more]

Sensors of Capital: Drawing for the English East India Company circa 1800

Research Seminar
This talk explores the relatively little-known visual work of military officers employed by the English East India Company for surveying, mapping, and illustrating. [more]

The Power of Matter: Signals to Trace a South American Material Atlas

Research Seminar
The material dimension of artistic artifacts is nothing but the coexistence and confluence of "minimal worlds". [more]

A Pictorial Agon: Experiments with Oils in Mural Painting, from Leonardo to Vasari

Part of the research seminar series Conserving Histories of Art
The recent restoration campaign of the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican Apostolic Palace has confirmed that Raphael authored the figures of Iustitia and Comitas, executed in oil on plaster. This talk will situate Raphael’s plan to paint the Vatican room in oils in the broader context of the experimentation with this technique that took place in Central Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. [more]

Describing Ukraine: Cartography and Travelogues

Exhibition online
An exhibition by the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History as part of the #ScienceForUkraine initiative. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Bibliotheca Hertziana has offered doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships to at-risk art historians from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus as a contribution to the international #ScienceForUkraine initiative. [more]

Controcultura in edicola: la rivoluzione di "Frigidaire"

Research Seminar
Questo research seminar mette a confronto diverse prospettive intorno alla rivista di informazione, approfondimento culturale e fumetti “Frigidaire” (novembre 1980 - ). In particolare, si esplorerà questo periodico come importante epicentro di diffusione di estetica controculturale – svolta attraverso fumetti, reportage, articoli di inchiesta e di critica – su un piano di produzione e distribuzione nazionale. [more]

Seeing like Dante: Similis and the Reader's Eye

Research Seminar
In this illustrated lecture, Bill Sherman will introduce his recent work on reading—and readers’ responses—as a visual rather than verbal phenomenon. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, in fact, there are all kinds of overlooked traces of visual responses to texts, from isolated doodles to fully fledged illustrative schemes. But we have never really known what to do with them, or even what to call them. [more]

Once upon a time… Reflections on the Links Between Art, Folklore and National Mythologies in the Early 20th Century Balkans

Brancusi’s work Maiastra will be the starting point of a reflection on the perception and reception of artworks inspired by folk tales and national mythologies in early 20th Century Balkans. [more]

The Voices, Sounds, and Images of Europe

Interdisciplinary Conference
Organised within the framework of the European Pavilion in Rome and dedicated to the many voices, languages and images that make up Europe, this afternoon at Bibliotheca Hertziana is divided into three programmes that combine presentations, listening sessions and exchanges with the guests and amongst the audience. [more]

The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes: Art History, Conservation, Material Science

Workshop
The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes is a collaborative multi-disciplinary project that has begun a comprehensive technical study of all of Bernini’s complete oeuvre in bronze. In the past year, the travelling team has studied bronzes in North American and Australian museums and will continue technical studies in Europe in 2023-2026. [more]

Black and White in Marble: an African Soldier for the Floor of Siena Cathedral

Research Seminar
“The most opposite of all are white and black, since nothing equals the look of black ink against white paper.” With these words Lodovico Dolce (1565) conceptualised the two ends of the colour spectrum. But what was the period’s understanding of black and white when applied to skin colour? Did the artistic practices carried out in workshops influence how Italian Renaissance artists understood skin tone? [more]

Massimo Piersanti e gli Incontri Internazionali d’Arte

Mostra fotografica
[more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (4th Research Seminar): Seeing through Madness: A Roman Holiday

Research Seminar
Inspired by Nietzsche’s remark that "madness in individuals is somewhat rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule", the book studies the representation of mental disorders across the media, ancient and modern. [more]

Research Seminar Series: "Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins"

1. Research Seminar: “Integration through Exhibition. On Large-scale Art Shows in Cold-War Divided Europe”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]

Past and Present Witnesses for Political Dissent in Belarus — Unofficial and Official Monuments in Dialogue

Research Seminar
The research seminar is dedicated to public monuments and the way they reflect and construct historical narratives. Its focus lies on the case study of Belarus, where contemporary artists engage with official monumental sculpture through critical interventions. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (3rd Research Seminar): Starting from Water. Ecological Reflections in the Mosaics of San Marco

Research Seminar
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Screening & Artist Talk with Mykola Ridnyi

This film seminar presents a screening of Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari and its research material, followed by an artist talk and public discussion. Russia’s attack on its neighbor is driven by a nationalist ideology, yet Russian propaganda justifies the invasion as one aimed against “fascists”. Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari (21 min, 2021) tackles this subject. [more]

Bilderwirtschaft: Fotografie als Ware und Material der Kunstgeschichte um 1900

Workshop
[more]

Parures et Parades: Being Signare in Senegal around 1800

Lecture
The lecture will focus on material culture, that is, the objects in use and the representations of an exceptional community: the Signares, mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée, who, through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, formed an elite. [more]

Tra Pompei e Marajó: cultura materiale, patrimoni del passato e debiti del presente

Research & Field Seminar
Teresa Cristina di Borbone delle Due Sicilie fu la terza e ultima imperatrice del Brasile. Responsabile dei dialoghi culturali tra l’Italia e il suo paese di adozione, lasciò al Brasile un’importante eredità: la Collezione Mediterranea del Museu Nacional da Quinta da Boa Vista che subì un gravissimo incendio nel 2018. [more]

Static Pictures, Living Portraits: Repainting, Conservation, and the Ontology of Images

Research Seminars Series "Conserving Histories of Art"
Portraiture, Alberti said, promises a permanence across time and space. Early modern artists and audiences had other ideas, though: they frequently interfered with ‘finished’ portraits. Carefully attending to the historical practices behind repainted portraits can help guide approaches to their conservation. [more]

Digital Publishing for the Humanities – New Technologies and Ideas

Digital Publishing for the Humanities
In recent years, digital publishing has increasingly acquired relevance in the Humanities. This is particularly the case for critical editions, which, notably when compared to print editions, can now profit from the flexibility of XML with TEI tag suite, full-text or faceted search functionalities, semantic annotations, named entity recognition and continuous improvement. [more]

Spazialità e identità in Italia (1796-1943). Definizione e metodologia

Quali sono le qualità attribuite allo spazio, a quello della città, degli edifici, dei musei, nella lenta costituzione di una “identità nazionale” italiana durante l’Ottocento fino agli anni del fascismo? In che modo la spazialità contribuisce a forgiare l’identità? [more]

Shaping "Spanish" Sicily: Spaces of Interaction and Dynamics of Power, Society and Visuality

Workshop
Reign or colony? Charles V’s succession to the Spanish Crown (1516) and the inclusion of Sicily into the domains of the empire visibly affected the socio-political and cultural conditions of the island. These transformations were mirrored in the artistic and architectonical production of Cinquecento and the beginning of the Seicento, and may be interpreted both as manifestations or consequences to the Hapsburg presence on the island, and as forms of expression of local communities' identities. [more]

Settimana tedesca

Dall’8 al 15 ottobre 2022 si svolgerà in tutta Italia la “Settimana Tedesca”, con un ricco programma di eventi e iniziative alla quale la Bibliotheca Hertziana – Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte partecipa. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (2nd Research Seminar): Southern Discomfort - Art and Abjection at the Birth of a Discipline

Research Seminar
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Ad tartaros: Art in Italy and Mongol Asia circa 1300

Lecture
The thirteenth-century rise of the Mongol Empire brought objects, peoples, and technologies into new and accelerated contact. This lecture explores the impact of this contact in Italian states around 1300, at a moment of intense artistic change. [more]

Images and Institutions: The Visual Culture of Early Modern Scientific Societies

Images and Institutions brings together an international team of historians of art and science for a three-day symposium in Rome to gain a larger picture of the relationships between visual culture and the developing practices of collaborative science. [more]

Images of War / War of Images: Politics of Visuality during Russian Invasion in Ukraine

Conference
The panel seeks to explore the visuality of the Russian-Ukrainian War, how its images are constructed and distributed, how they function within the social and political contexts, how they shape and transform those contexts, what antagonisms, continuities and discontinuities they create. [more]

İSTANBUL SURLARI - The Land Walls of Istanbul

Online Exhibition
Photographs by Domenico Ventura [more]

Drowning in Print

Research Seminar
Few early modern prints render swimming as a feat of resistance against both water and air; fewer indicate its risks. How to show the calisthenic movement of a figure both within and without the water? How about the resistance of waves to the exertion of a body propelling its own weight through a slick, transparent, heavy medium? [more]

The Fragility of Pastel

Workshop
Pastel is a difficult medium for art history. Its origin is obscure, its classification complex, its status suspended between painting and drawing, between preparatory and finished work. One thing about pastel is clear, though: its extreme susceptibility to damage. [more]

The "Safe Outward Journey" of Rosalba Carriera’s Pastels and the Protection of the Three Kings

Keynote Lecture - part of the Workshop "The Fragility of Pastel"
Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) was known throughout Europe for her extraordinary works in pastel. She was the most celebrated woman artist in eighteenth-century Venice. Apprehensive about her paintings’ well-being, Rosalba was anxious to protect them during their perilous journeys to their patrons and secure their future survival. [more]

Visual and Material Culture of Microscopy in Seventeenth-Century Italy

Workshop
  • Participation on site previous registration
  • Start: Jun 22, 2022
  • End: Jun 24, 2022
When researching the history of microscopy, Rome is a natural place to start. It is in Rome under the auspices of the Accademia dei Lincei that Federico Cesi published his microscopic observations of bees in his Melissographia (1625) and the Apiarium (1626). In honour of the recently elected Barberini Pope, Urban VIII, whose family’s coat of arms includes three bees, the bee became the first object of visual presentation of the research that was made possible through the new instrument that would soon be called “microscope.” [more]

Transparent Visuality: the Micaceous Image in Early Modern Europe

Research Seminar
Extracted in Siberia and moved in Anglo-Russian trade, the foliaceous mineral muscovite (white mica) fed the imaginations of early modern painters, poets, and natural philosophers alike. This seminar will focus on a group of micaceous objects — portrait overlays, embroidered cabinets, scientific instruments, and a perspective treatise — that dramatize a culture of interaction between art and science, amateurs and experts, foreign travel and domesticity in the long seventeenth century. [more]

Writing on Tombs. Narratives, Rules, Inscriptions in Medieval and Early Modern Times

Conference
How were tombs conceived, narrated and represented in writings in medieval and early modern times? What was the contribution of writing in the actions that immediately followed the death? What rules determined the shape and the position of tombs? [more]

SS. Sergio e Bacco

Visita Guidata
In una delle più belle piazzette del rione Monti si trova la piccola e antica chiesa dei SS. Sergio e Bacco, cattedrale del Esarcato Apostolico di Kiev e luogo di riferimento per la comunità ucraina di Roma. [more]

Queer Collecting and Masculine Desire in Fin-de-Siècle Period

Research Seminar
A new relationship to art object collections appeared during the second half of the 19th century, through forms of affection and emotion linked to the rise of modernity. The object becomes the support of fantasies and the expression of a sensuality in the more specific context of Orientalism and Japonisme. [more]

Gateways to Medieval Naples

Field School
In recent years, the art and architecture of medieval Naples has been the subject of renewed scholarly activity that is generating important research on understudied monuments and exploring fresh approaches to the history of the city’s material culture. A next generation of scholars is reassessing Neapolitan studies and advancing research with greater interdisciplinary breadth and expanded geographic scope. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (1st Research Seminar): Mimesis and Self-Mimesis: What Belongs to Whom?

In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Strategies of Narration, Strategies of Transformation. Spazio figurato and Romanesque Painting in Italy, from the Old Testament to the Apocalypse

Research Seminar
It is an art historical trope that medieval churches offered the presence of Heaven to those on Earth, but how exactly might this occur? Attention to Romanesque wall paintings in their architectural and liturgical settings offers some indications of the transformative power of images. [more]

Performances in the Garden: Ghosts are Welcomed to the Garden

Performance
Il giardino è un luogo domestico oppure no? È custodito, protetto dalle mura, è progettato e gestito dalla/dal giardiniera/giardiniere, supervisionato dalla/dal proprietaria/proprietario. Eppure, c’è qualcosa di misteriosamente incontrollabile che striscia nei suoi angoli d’ombra, fruscia nei cespugli nella notte più silenziosa. Uccelli, insetti e venti non si curano delle recinzioni e delle politiche di proprietà privata, vi dimorano senza chiedere il permesso, creando i loro sconcertanti habitat o soggiorni, ignorando l’ordine stabilito. Lo stesso vale per i fantasmi. [more]

Olevano Romano. Misurare un mito - Vermessung eines Mythos / Mostra, giornata di studio, simposio - Ausstellung, Studientag und Symposium

Symposium
Vor zweihundert Jahren, um 1820/25 wurde das kleine italienische Bergstädtchen Olevano von den Malern der Romantik entdeckt – und in einen neuartigen Wahrnehmungsraum und mythischen Ort verwandelt. [more]

Das wahre Kreuz in Rom und die Inszenierung von Reliquien in Architektur und Stadtraum: Santa Croce in Gerusalemme

Öffentliche Führung
Die Kirche Santa Croce in Gerusalemme – in den frühen Quellen schlicht „Jerusalem“ genannt – war schon seit ihrer Gründung im 4. Jahrhundert mit einer Kreuzreliquie ausgestattet, die laut der spätmittelalterlichen Legende von der Kaisermutter Helena direkt vom Ort der Kreuzigung in Jerusalem nach Rom gebracht worden war. [more]

Embodying Europe in the Early-Modern Period

Research Seminar
In the early-modern period, a vibrant debate about Europe’s political fate, its borders, and its identity emerged. While travelogues enhanced the knowledge of non-European cultures, the growing news media contributed to the discourse on Europe as well by reporting continuously on its contemporary history. [more]
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