Lise Meitner Group
Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History
Profile
In recent years, conservation has emerged as one of the central issues of our time, inextricably affected by climate change, armed conflict, the rise of new materials and technologies, and the post-colonial reckoning of museums grappling with looting and restitution debates. Funded by the Max Planck Society’s flagship Lise-Meitner Excellence Program, the Research Group historicizes these issues and investigates how people in the past contended with the material lives of objects. Our focus is on European and colonial art histories from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, a period during which techniques and media were ranked based on their ability to last, and decay was first recognized as a subject worthy of aesthetic and scientific attention. By probing a tradition that has always equated durability with value, the project promotes a fundamental engagement with the material vulnerability and impermanence of artworks and a deeper understanding of the mechanics of decay and loss.
Approach
We work collaboratively, bridging art history, conservation, and museum and heritage studies to investigate how communities interact with their past – and what they choose to take from it into the future. We often find ourselves working against art historical conventions: we look beyond the artist’s initial conception and expression, the space of the workshop or display, or the object’s original condition. Our approach draws attention to acts of care, maintenance, and repair, and the interpretative challenges they pose to the discipline. We consider these practices sites of knowledge production and explore how they might work alongside or against processes of physical decay, damage, deterioration, destruction, and wasting. For this reason, our projects are arranged along two main axes: “care” and “loss.” These are the two basic material operations or maneuvers, to borrow a term from Jennifer Roberts, that allow us to cut across periods and media to explore shared concerns through histories of loss and recovery, deterioration and repair, unmaking and remaking.
Annual Research Initiatives
Each year, we structure our research around a central theme, the focus of our Annual Initiatives: Waste (2022–2023), Loot (2023–2024), Rework (2024–2025), and Lacunae (2025–2026). Developed in collaboration with affiliated scholars and pre- and postdoctoral research fellows, each initiative is supported through partnerships with local collections and institutions, as well as with other Max Planck Research Groups – for instance, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heisenberg Project and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. We secure external funding for each initiative (most recently through the Getty Paper Project Initiative and the Association for Art History) and publish two book-length contributions per year, in addition to the individual publications of our fellows. For each theme, we organize a multi-day international conference alongside a calendar of related activities. These always include one artist intervention, two keynote lectures by leading experts, as well as roundtable discussions and site visits across the city of Rome – a landscape shaped by objects lost, spoiled, reused, and recovered.
The outcomes of each Annual Research Initiative are collected in a volume of essays, forming part of a dedicated editorial series DIS/APPEARANCE published by Officina Libraria. Grounded in art history but working in dialogue with other fields, the series models innovative approaches to the study of material vulnerability across media. It grapples with the stakes of maintenance and care practices and the consequences these carry for the longevity of the archive and the future of the canon, as objects of art historical inquiry continuously appear and disappear from view. This is the central collective output of the Lise Meitner Group.
Curation and Conservation
In parallel, we run two continuous series of events to support our scholars in their work. Conserving Histories of Art is an ongoing series of dialogues that expose our junior scholars to the technical experises of curators, conservators, and conservation scientists. The series presents museums and collections as places of material experimentation and seeks to encourage the recognition of the material intelligence embedded in objects and their conservation; the residency of an ICCROM fellow provides ongoing contact with issues of heritage preservation. A weekly Writing Retreat, open to all Institute members, aims to support everyone’s personal research engagement and to prioritize writing without pressure from other obligations, offering structured time in which to write in a collegial and supportive environment.
Beyond these events, much of what we do happens outside the Hertziana. We support our junior scholars to bring our work to professional art history conferences and symposia (RSA, CAA, AAH, and CIHA, among others) to exchange ideas with academics, curators, artists, Ph.D. students, and early career researchers working on related topics. Fellows affiliated with the Research Group are also active as curatorial fellows and guest curators and cultivate close ties with local and international collections. Recent collaborations include the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, and the Palladio Museum in Vicenza. In 2025, through our partnership with the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, we secured conservation for five drawings from the Hertziana collection, offering fellows a unique opportunity for direct engagement with conservation decisions. Beyond curating a Research Exhibition at the Hertziana, we are also actively exploring the display of fragile works on paper such as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man or Michelangelo's Lybian Sybil in connection to Corpi moderni, an exhibition curated by Francesca Borgo at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. This hands-on activity informs our work as scholars and enriches our approach to our guiding questions.