Annual Research Initiative
Each year, the Lise Meitner Group’s Annual Research Initiative considers the practical and theoretical repercussions that a specific form of loss poses for the discipline. It brings together scholars, conservators, curators, and artists to promote research that explores what those repercussions mean not only for objects but also for our approach to them. Taken together, Annual Research Initiatives encourage a broad rethinking of loss as something that can materially transform, conceptually reclassify, and otherwise uncover new categories of object – a force that shapes both what is left of the history of art to study and the biases, limits, and lenses that inform how we study it.
In 2022–23 Waste (from the Latin vastus, or void) examined what is intentionally thrown away. In 2023–24 Loot addressed the dispersal of objects in wartime. This year, Rework examines the erasure of the original state of the artwork. Next year, our fourth and final yearly initiative will be devoted to Lacunae.
2022/23: Waste
The initiative addressed the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in the early modern workshop.
Collaborations:
Association for Art History
St Andrews Network for Climate, Energy, Environment and Sustainability
Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces
Fellows and guest scholars:
Ruth Ezra (St Andrews/eikones)
Site visits:
Monte dei Cocci, led by The British School at Rome
The American Academy Sustainable Food Project
Conference organizers:
Ruth Ezra (St Andrews/eikones)
Francesca Borgo (BHMPI/St Andrews)
Keynote speakers:
Simon Werrett (UCL)
Vittoria Di Palma (USC)
Artist intervention:
DOM in conversation with Marco Armiero (L’era degli scarti/Wasteocene, 2021)
Outputs:
Wastework (Officina Libraria, 2024)
Waste, a special issue of the journal West86th
2023/24: Loot
The initiative investigated the ways in which conflict and its resolution moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period.
Collaborations:
Museo dell'Arte Salvata/Museo Nazionale Romano
The Inheritance of Looting, University of Bern
St Andrews School of Art History
Heisenberg Project, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law
Fellows and guest scholars:
Sarah Rosenthal (Harvard)
Sarah Petrilli Jones (Yale/Scuola Normale Superiore/American Academy)
Francesco Guidi (BHMPI)
Julia Vázquez (BHMPI)
Guido Rebecchini (2025, The Courtauld)
Site visits:
Palazzo della Marina
Museo Centrale del Risorgimento
Sacrario delle Bandiere
Istituto Storico e di Cultura dell’Arma del Genio
Museo delle Civiltá; Chiesa di Santa Maria in Vallicella
Museo Storico Navale, Venezia
Conference organizers:
Julia Vázquez (BHMPI)
Francesca Borgo (BHMPI/St Andrews)
Keynote speakers:
Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell)
Erin Thompson (CUNY)
Artist intervention:
Sammy Baloji
Outputs:
Loot and Repair. Plunder and Restitution between the Early Modern Battlefield and the Modern-Day Museum (Officina Libraria, forthcoming in 2025)
Renaissance Loot. Stories of Objects in Wartime (Cambridge University Press, expected in 2026)
2024/25: Rework
Erasing the original state of the object, alterations reflect shifts in taste, circumstance, and objectives. This initiative takes the most easily altered support, paper, as its main case study.
Collaborations:
The Paper Project by Getty
Istituto Centrale per la Grafica
Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano
Fondazione Camillo Caetani
Gernsheim Study Days
Fellows and guest scholars:
Camilla Colzani (Università di Urbino)
Alice Ottazzi (I Tatti/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz)
Helen Kohn (Goethe University of Frankfurt)
Agnieszka Dziki (University of Warsaw)
Site visits:
Archivio della Fondazione Camillo Caetani
Fondazione Fedrigoni Fabriano
Istituto Centrale per la Grafica
Conference organizers:
Tatjana Bartsch (BHMPI)
Johannes Röll (BHMPI)
Francesca Borgo (BHMPI/St Andrews)
Keynote speakers:
Carmen Bambach (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Jonathan Bober (formerly National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
Antony Griffiths (formerly British Museum)
Outputs:
Rework, Retouch, Care. Case Studies from the Hertziana Collection (Research Exhibition, 2025)