Dr. Marieke von Bernstorff

Marieke von Bernstorff is head of the Publications, Public Relations, and Reporting (PPRR) Department at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. After undertaking a one-year general studies program (Studium generale) at the Leibniz Kolleg (Tübingen) in 1993/94, she studied history, art history, and political science in Bonn and Berlin. Her dissertation drew on research conducted in Italy and Spain and examined processes of social and artistic transformation in the early 17th century and the modus operandi associated with the early modern art world; in doing so, it used the example of the Roman aristocrat Giovan Battista Crescenzi and the painter Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, both of whom were active in Rome and Madrid. The result was a study that shed new light on Caravaggism, still life in Italy and Spain, aristocratic dilettantism, and artistic patronage linked to and influenced by a thriving art market. Her doctoral project was supported by a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf) and in 2010 it was awarded the Hans Janssen Prize of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. From 2005 she was research collaborator to the director of the Hertziana, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer. She again examined diplomatic and artistic exchange between Italy and Spain together with Susanne Kubersky-Piredda with a 2008 conference whose proceedings were published under the title L'arte del dono. Scambi artistici e diplomazia tra Italia e Spagna, 1550–1650 (2013). She has also been a member of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded research group that has set itself the goal of producing a bilingual, annotated edition of Giovan Pietro Bellori's Le vite de' pittori scultori ed architetti moderni (Rome 1672). Within this framework, she published her research results in 2022 with the critical edition of Bellori's Vita of Domenico Zampieri, known as Domenichino.

Marieke von Bernstorff has been the Institute's press officer since 2011 and head of the communication and editorial office since 2013. In addition to supervising the Institute's own publication series, she is the point of contact for questions regarding the publication of scholarship in art history, with a particular interest in the printed book as an object with its own specific set of aesthetics. She is responsible for the following series: Studien der Bibliotheca Hertziana (Hirmer Verlag, Munich); Studi della Bibliotheca Hertziana (Silvana Editore, Cinisello Balsamo); Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana (Campisano Editore, Rome); Bellori Edition (Wallstein, Göttingen).

As head of public relations, she is the point of contact for media representatives, among others, and is responsible for the Hertziana's internal and external communications. She has developed various formats of communication suited to publicizing the research conducted at the Hertziana and aimed at internal and external stakeholders. One example of such a format is the video series Hertziana Insights, a series of short documentary films that brings selected research themes investigated by Hertziana scholars to a larger audience.