Events Archive

Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome and online

At the Center of the Periphery: East Berlin and the Face Value of Photo Books

Keynote Lecture as part of the photo-historical seminar “Centers and Peripheries: Photography’s Geography Lessons"
The East German state, the German Democratic Republic, fashioned itself as a “Leseland” or a “land of reading.” A diversified field of publishing houses and an immense book production, sometimes with remarkably high print runs, may justify such an image. Yet, many of these publications did not address the eyes of the reader but the beholder—in the form of photographically illustrated books. Unsurprisingly, Berlin, the capital of the East German state, was among the most prominent subjects. [more]

The Rough, the Smooth, and the White in ca. 1600 Hizen: The Rhetoric of Porcelain

Research Seminar
The Portuguese, like many Europeans at this time, brought with them to Hizen province (modern Saga and Nagasaki prefectures), in northwestern Kyushu, a certain ceramic theory of classification and taste that did not allow them to understand Japanese preferences on the local terms. Nor did these nanbanjin (Southern barbarians) comprehend the preference for a seemingly random assemblage of a wide variety of local and imported ceramic works. [more]

Navigating the Victorian Photograph Album: Itineraries, Histories, Erasures

Keynote Lecture as part of the photo-historical seminar “Centers and Peripheries: Photography’s Geography Lessons"
Photograph albums of Victorian Britain have often been interpreted in terms of the social and familial networks of their compilers, but they also imply certain geographies – local and transnational, imagined and travelled – that are not always brought to the same level of critical attention. This lecture examines an impressive album compiled by Cecilia Mary Jocelyn, née Elliot, which is currently on permanent display at the National Portrait Gallery in London. [more]

From Storms to Stars: Materiality and Visualizations of the Sky

Research Seminar
How do we capture the ever-changing nature of the sky? This research seminar examines the different strategies artists and scientists have used to visualize the terrestrial and celestial sky. [more]

Transnational Circulation of Devotional Objects through Religious Orders: between the Iberian World and Rome

Workshop
This workshop is organized by the ProJestArt Research Group, Agents: Jesuit Procurators and Alternative Channels for Artistic Circulation in the Hispanic World (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), in collaboration with Prof. Tristan Weddigen (Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome). [more]

Literary and Cultural Circulation Between Italy and Brazil

Workshop
As part of the 2024 celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Italian emigration to Brazil, this workshop will explore the artistic and cultural ties between the two nations from the turn of the 20th century to the present. [more]

Sensorial Encounters: Haptic and Non-Visual Access in Art

Workshop
Sensorial Encounters: Haptic and Non-Visual Access in Art is an exploratory workshop that challenges the primacy of visual perception and terminology in art and art history. Inspired by the methodological insights of authors such as Georgina Kleege, Elizabeth Bearden and Amanda Cachia, among others, this workshop que stions the traditional conflation of sight with knowledge. [more]

Female Figures on the Moon: Intertwining Science, Philosophy and Literature

Research Seminar
In this lecture, Natacha Fabbri will introduce her recent work on the multifaceted relationship between women and the Moon in Western culture from the 16th to the 19th century. The talk will discuss the pioneering women who studied, described, and depicted the Earth’s satellites, as well as the role that the new image of the Moon played in the debate on the querelle des femmes, serving as a tool to challenge prejudicial readings. [more]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (8th Research Seminar): 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]

“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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]
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