The Transnational History of Art History
Profile
Starting with the global reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History and the ongoing publication of his Collected Works, this Research Priority conceives the history of art history in a transnational perspective as a migration of ideas, texts, and the authors themselves. A further component is a critical reflection on the globalization of historical and contemporary research methods and technologies. Exploring early scholarship on Indian art, for example, leads to new questions about form and formalism, the role of geometric abstraction as a modern universal language of art, and artistic research and art history, which have their roots in classical Italian art and art theory. The goal is to inspire a critical history of methods, theory, and research that places Italian art, architecture, and art theory of the early modern period in the focus of transnational aesthetic discourses and within the framework of a geography of concepts and terms. The Department aims to support the methodological innovation of the Institute’s research practices and to expand them to Feminism and Gender Studies, post- and decolonial approaches, the history of art history, an iconology of mediums, materials and techniques, Digital Humanities, Eco-Criticism, and Disability Studies. Thus, this Research Priority intersects with all the others in the Department.
Report 2022–2024
The Department’s approaches to theory are two-fold and mutually dependent: on the one hand, foundational texts and terms are studied from a historical standpoint, on the other, new methodologies are put to the test.
Wölfflin’s Works
The SNSF funding of the edition project Heinrich Wölfflin – Gesammelte Werke (HWGW) since 2015 (ca. 3.8M EUR) came to an end in December 2024. To mark this occasion, the team organized the final international conference Form, Style, Principles: Art Historical and Theoretical Reflections, as a reflection on key terms of Art History. This also served as the launch of the digital open-access edition of Salomon Geßner (1889) and Die Jugendwerke des Michelangelo (1891) on the HumanitiesConnect platform, for which extensive programming, transcribing, tagging, and indexing work has been done in collaboration with Elisa Bastianello, while the design concept was developed by LMK. The HWGW project is a member of the new Center Digital Editions & Edition Analytics (ZDE) at UZH, and its unique workflow has been presented successfully to the critical editions community and registered as a prototypal solution in the Proto4DigEd catalog. In the last three years, two volumes came out in print: Renaissance und Barock. Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (1888), introduced by Oskar Bätschmann, and annotated by Noemi Bearth and Karolina Zgraja (2023, 444 p., Schriften 2), and Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl. Die Kunst der Renaissance (1931), introduced by Hubert Locher, and annotated by Teresa Ende (2024, 824 p., Schriften 8). Team members have published on Wölfflin, including one article in the Institute’s 2023 Jahrbuch. In the present report, only the projects of those collaborators who have been employed at the Institute in the past three years are described.
Histories of Methodology
To address the political urgency of rethinking art historical methodologies at the Institute, Giovanna Targia and Tobias Teutenberg from the Wölfflin team co-organized eight Research Seminars in the series entitled Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History that explored the sacralization of urban space, early modern natural conceptions of creativity, post-war notions of realism in Eastern Europe, models of Modernity, the notion of madness, ecocritical imaginaries of water, abjection in Kunstwissenschaft, and self-mimesis. The series was complemented by Weddigen’s Spring Term Opening Lecture Neobaroque Modern: Oscar Niemeyer and the Construction of a Brazilian Identity, and a Workshop at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, dedicated to photography as a medium of Kunstwissenschaft. This year, in collaboration with the research group Rethinking Art History Through Disability at UZH, a Workshop was organized to explore non-visual access to art. To analyze the shifting understandings of Renaissance up to the present day, the Department participated in the organization of the conference The Notion of Renaissance, Between History and Myth. Origins, Transformations, New-Perspectives at the Palazzo Venezia. The Department has funded the publication of the conference proceedings dedicated to the visual historiography of Michelangelo’s sculpture, and continues to support the German commentary edition of Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Lives, of which the volumes on Poussin and Domenichino have been published.
Outlook
From 2025, the Wölfflin project will be continued at the Bibliotheca Hertziana; four postdoctoral and several external collaborators will absorb a significant part of the Department’s budget. Thus, no additional Fellows were allocated to this Research Priority. Over the course of the year, Die klassische Kunst (1899), and Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (1905) will be printed, while Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886) and Renaissance und Barock (1888) will appear on the HumanitiesConnect platform. Work will continue on Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte (1940) and Kleine Schriften. In addition, archival materials (Schriften, part II) such as lecture notes and the manuscript for the second part of Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe are being prepared for publication. The proceedings of the Wölfflin and the Renaissance conferences are planned to be published as open access. A Workshop on the history of art therapy will be organized to contribute to the history of methodologies.
