Events

Shoptalks

Workshop
In this one-day event, fellows share insights and findings from the research projects they are undertaking at the Bibliotheca Hertizana. [more]

The Instruction of Drawing: Artistic Creative Formation in the Amazon (Late 18th Century)

Research Seminar
In the late 18th century, in the Amazonian drawing schools, as in Europe, copying and imitating academic prints was not only a means of disseminating thought and artistic knowledge but also an explicit principle of creative formation, helping artists develop their own unique style. [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]

Memory Traces: The Intellectual Work of the Line in Leonardo da Vinci’s Drawing Practice

Research Seminar
In this conversation, two experts from the field of Renaissance art history examine drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and uncover a particular workshop practice of the artist. [more]

Stone into Stone

Research Seminar
What does it mean for an artist to transform stone into stone? How do we understand mimesis that eliminates the difference between material and its representation? This lecture examines these questions through the lens of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain (1648-51), focusing on its rocky grotto base hewn from craggy, porous travertine so as to look like the stone itself in its natural state. [more]

An English Alabaster in Aragonese Naples

Research Seminar
In the 15th century, a monumental English alabaster altarpiece of the Passion traveled to Naples, though it was only documented 200 years later. Asking how, where, and why this artwork would have been received in Aragonese Naples, this project explores courtly collecting practices and the tactility of alabaster. [more]

The Artificial Eye. Art Theory and Optical Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

Research Seminar
While it is well known that the optical revolution completely changed our perception of the world, thanks in particular to the invention of the telescope and the microscope, its importance for the development of art history remains largely underestimated. However, the sources at our disposal clearly reveal that art connoisseurs and theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries were quick to exploit advances in optics to improve their own protocols for reading art objects. [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]

Synthetic Realities, Real Violence: AI and Imaging Tech in Contemporary Conflicts

Research Seminar
Discussing the convergence of artificial intelligence, imaging technologies, and modern conflict, Donatella Della Ratta and Lesia Vasylchenko will explore how AI-driven forms of representation reshape reality and generate new forms of violence. [more]

Geografie, spazi e luoghi della mascolinità e dell'omosessualità nell’Italia fascista

Research Seminar
Questo Research Seminar si focalizzerà su spazi, luoghi e architetture della mascolinità dell’Italia fascista, utilizzando la storia di genere e della sessualità come utile strumento di indagine dei contesti urbani ed extraurbani del periodo. Un focus su tre città in particolare, Roma, Venezia e Catania, permetterà inoltre di articolare questi temi al dialogo tra Nord e Sud, e alle costruzioni di genere associate ai rispettivi immaginari geografici. [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]

La svolta mediale. Dai mezzi di comunicazione ai processi di mediazione

Research Seminar
Negli ultimi decenni siamo passati dal pensare ai media come mezzi di comunicazione al considerarli come ambienti, poi come infrastrutture, e infine come dispositivi per mediare con il mondo. Ma cosa significa mediare con il mondo? Cercare di appropriarsene o cercare di difendersi da esso? [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]

Shoptalks

In this one-day event, fellows share insights and findings from the research projects they are undertaking at the Bibliotheca Hertizana. [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]

Giovanni Testori fra teatro e critica d’arte. Quando il lavoro del critico trapassa nell’invenzione del vero scrittore

Research Seminar
Narratore, poeta, critico d’arte e pittore. Drammaturgo, regista e anche attore. Giovanni Testori è stato un autore complesso e prolifico, di cui rimane ancora molto da approfondire. Il seminario offre un’occasione per indagare la connessione tra il Testori drammaturgo e il critico d’arte, partendo dalle riflessioni teoriche sul teatro contenute nel saggio del 1968 “Il ventre del teatro”. [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]

«Romano nell’animo e nel volto». Il paradigma del Duce

Research Seminar
Mussolini fu assimilato a molti grandi personaggi della Roma antica. Ma egli apparve soprattutto come la reincarnazione stessa del tipo romano. Nelle arti e nelle parole scritte e pronunciate, il Duce era la presenza rassicurante del genio della stirpe millenaria nell’Italia fascista. [more]

Brazilian Art and the Return to Painting in the 1980s

Research Seminar
Reviewing the samba school processions during the 1987 carnival in Rio de Janeiro, art critic Frederico Morais cited Achille Bonito Oliva. The Italian art critic and curator had been in Brazil only a few days before, and caused outrage with certain derisory comments about the local culture; notably, that Brazilian art was inextricably associated with samba. [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]

Il colore nella cultura e nell’arte medievale: teorie, fonti, materiali (1100–1250)

Research Seminar
Il colore nella cultura pre-moderna è a tutti gli effetti un “oggetto culturale”. Valutarne il ruolo nella cultura e nell’arte del Medioevo significa innanzitutto avere a che fare con questioni e problemi che interessano linguistica, la scienza, l’estetica e la teologia, oltre che la trattatistica tecnica. [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]

Max Peiffer Watenphul: Photography and the Queer Bauhaus!

Lecture
The photographs of Max Peiffer Watenphul, the Bauhaus’s first known queer member, capture campy portraits of his Bauhaus friends, scenes of queer desire, and cityscapes in Italy, where he first traveled as a Rome Prize recipient and later as an exile. [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]

Shoptalks

In this one-day event, the fellows of the Bibliotheca Hertziana present their research projects. [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]

Nuove fonti documentarie su Ludwig Pollak, un protagonista del mercato internazionale dell'arte nella prima metà del '900

Research Seminar
L’archeologo, connoisseur e mercante d’arte praghese Ludwig Pollak (1868–1943) è stato uno dei principali protagonisti del mercato dell’arte e del collezionismo a Roma tra la fine del XIX secolo e i primi decenni del Novecento. [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]

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]

Artists as Futurists? On the History of Durability in Art and the Making of the Future

Research Seminar
Why did artists want to make objects they hoped would last a long time? And why did their patrons want to own long-lasting works of art? This talk will give an introduction to Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts (DURARE), a project funded by the European Research Council. [more]

Scraping the Surface: Mezzotint and the Delicate Matter of Skin in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Part of the research seminar series 'Conserving Histories of Art'
Made by rocking a toothed blade across a plate thousands of times to create a delicate burred surface and then scraping or burnishing the burrs to create tonal gradations, the mezzotint – both as matrix and print – is notoriously fragile. [more]

From the Street to the Museum and Back to the Street…

Research Seminar
A seminar led by Hou Hanru, on the interaction between artistic interventions in the urban space and the evolution of the institution. Contemporary art has a powerful and perpetual “tradition” of negotiating with the boundary between real life and art, between everyday space and institutional frameworks. [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]

Art as Project, Project as Art: Antonio Dias and Painting after Conceptual Art

Research Seminar
In this research seminar, Sérgio B. Martins explores two competing notions of project that informed Antonio Dias's painting in the early 1970s, one relating to the unfinished project as a subgenre of Conceptual art and the other to Italian debates apropos of the crisis of the historicity of modern art. [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]

Imperial Games: Visuality, Tactility and Synaesthesia

Research Seminar
This research seminar examines the role of boardgames, toys and optical devices in the construction of an imperial subjectivity in the nineteenth century. [more]

Domus Aurea in 1775 and 'Risposta dell'Architecto Vincenzo Brenna'

Research Seminar
In spring 1775 Roman Architect Vincenzo Brenna (1741–1820) published his answer to a critic that can be read as a short statement of his understanding of Roman antiquity and the way it should be treated. The seminar will investigate various contexts of this publication. [more]

Artisti latinoamericani in Italia

Research Seminar
A partire dalla seconda metà del XIX secolo, l'attrazione delle accademie italiane, il fascino della tradizione artistica e la disponibilità di botteghe e maestri, determinarono l'inizio di un flusso migratorio irregolare di giovani artisti dagli Stati latinoamericani di recente formazione, che desideravano consolidarne il tessuto culturale e costruire una difficle identità nazionale. [more]

Colour matters: New approaches to chromatic materiality: the ERC project CHROMOTOPE (2019-2024)

Research Seminar
The ERC project CHROMOTOPE focuses on the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in Victorian England, then in the vanguard of the industrial revolution. [more]

'Taio dorado': On Wood and Gold in Fifteenth-Century Venice

Research Seminar
In the Hebrew bible, carved wooden form and hammered gold surface are the very stuff of skillful fabrication; wood overlaid with pure gold honoured the Holy of Holies and Solomonic rule. Thinking wood and gold together, this exploratory paper will address the many kinds of work – religious, political, economic and aesthetic – that this apparently pragmatic pairing was put to use in Quattrocento Venice, a republic in which sites, things and institutions proliferated as ‘golden’. [more]

From the Epic Poem to the Postcolonial History of Art, Fragments of a Reflection

Research Seminar
Starting from the film Notes for an African Orestes (1970) by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elvan Zabunyan proposes a reflection in the form of a comparative analysis between the epic poem, colonial history, and postcolonial emancipation in the arts, traveling between the African continent, the Caribbean region and Europe. [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]

Rinascimento visionario: Giovanni di Paolo tra i surrealisti

Research Seminar
L’intervento intende ricomporre la fortuna critica e la memoria visiva di un artista senese del Quattrocento in ambito surrealista: dalle pagine della rivista «Documents» alla mostra Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism al MoMA di New York, l’interesse crescente per la pittura ‘eccentrica’ di Giovanni di Paolo è esemplare dell’osmosi che esiste tra storiografia e arte moderna e interroga le dinamiche che definiscono questo scambio in termini di riscoperta critica, appropriazione culturale, intertestualità visiva. [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]

Exhibitions and Exhibitionism: Art in Public Spaces

Research Seminar
In this thought-provoking lecture, international artist Luis Camnitzer (born 1937) challenges the notion of art in public spaces and highlights its drawbacks. [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]

Portraits and Pathologies. Likenesses and Clinical Pictures in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Research Seminar
This lecture engages with relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. It will argue that definitions and practices of portraiture evolving around the notion of character were crucial for the development of the pathological image meant to capture the ‘characteristic traits’ of a disease. [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]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 5

Art History in Ukraine, Now: A Workshop with Getty x Hertziana Grantees
Short presentations of current research in art history conducted by Ukrainian scholars supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories and the Bibliotheca Hertziana. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 4

Research Seminar
The fourth research seminar dedicated to the history of Ukrainian art will cover some aspects of contemporary art discourses in Ukraine. Tetiana Kochubinska and Natalia Matsenko, who work both as researchers and curators, will share their perspectives on the development of media art in Ukraine after the 1990s, and the artistic reflection of social shifts in the country that began in 2014. [more]

Media Involution and Political Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England

Research Seminar
Over sixty years ago, Curt Bühler, curator of rare books at the Morgan Library, mused, “The fifteenth century, it may well be said, was one of the most curious and confused periods in recorded history. Not the least curious and confusing of its aspects is the story of the book production in that century.” While Bühler was reflecting on the impact of print, his comments apply well to England’s situation, which, for the most part of the fifteenth century, remained unrocked by any media revolutions. [more]

Il tempo della terracotta

Part of the research seminar series 'Conserving Histories of Art'
Taking a broad chronological approach, this seminar reflects on some of the main moments in terracotta’s critical reception in the modern age. In literary judgements and collecting alike, terracotta seems more than other materials to have passed from the background to the fore of art history several times within the space of a few centuries. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 3

Research Seminar
The third research seminar in the series of meetings dedicated to the history of Ukrainian art will be dedicated to its late-Soviet period. Polina Baitsym and Oksana Trypolska will elaborate on the fused nature of official and non-official aspects in the functioning of art practices of that time. [more]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 2

Research Seminar
"(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art" is a series of meetings by Ukrainian scholars to give a panoramic overview of the key episodes in the history of the country’s visual heritage. The second research seminar by Svitlana Rybalko and Oksana Barshynova will address the entangled history of Ukrainian art of the early 20thcentury. [more]

Foreign Travelers and Urban Mobility. Understanding the Three Ecologies of Early Modern Rome

Research Seminar
Although wandering in Rome was a common activity among its visitors, French travelers were unique in developing a distinct philosophical discourse on walking, inspired by the rebuilding of Paris. This conference traces their itineraries through texts and images that analyze Rome’s transformations between the 16th and the 18th centuries. It investigates their role in constructing Rome’s modern image through the physical engagement with its material, natural, and social environments. [more]

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”

3. Research Seminar: "The Eastern European Body"
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]

Nunc est caro Christi. Images, Inscriptions, and the Making of the Eucharist

Research Seminar
Three pieces produced in Germany in the early 13th century for the Abbey of St. Trudpert present a very rich set of images and inscriptions that reveal a singular vision of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and an original approach to sacramental theology in general. [more]

Research Seminar Series: “Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins”

2. Research Seminar: “An Encounter of the Opposites: Images of Russia in European Renaissance Writing and the Russian Responses”
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]

(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 1

Research Seminar
"(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art" is a series of meetings by Ukrainian scholars to give a panoramic overview of the key episodes in the history of the country’s visual heritage. The first research seminar by Stefania Demchuk and Nazar Kozak will give insight into the issues connected with the study of Medieval and early Modern art in Ukraine. [more]

Sensors of Capital: Drawing for the English East India Company circa 1800

Research Seminar
This talk explores the relatively little-known visual work of military officers employed by the English East India Company for surveying, mapping, and illustrating. [more]

The Power of Matter: Signals to Trace a South American Material Atlas

Research Seminar
The material dimension of artistic artifacts is nothing but the coexistence and confluence of "minimal worlds". [more]

A Pictorial Agon: Experiments with Oils in Mural Painting, from Leonardo to Vasari

Part of the research seminar series Conserving Histories of Art
The recent restoration campaign of the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican Apostolic Palace has confirmed that Raphael authored the figures of Iustitia and Comitas, executed in oil on plaster. This talk will situate Raphael’s plan to paint the Vatican room in oils in the broader context of the experimentation with this technique that took place in Central Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. [more]

Controcultura in edicola: la rivoluzione di "Frigidaire"

Research Seminar
Questo research seminar mette a confronto diverse prospettive intorno alla rivista di informazione, approfondimento culturale e fumetti “Frigidaire” (novembre 1980 - ). In particolare, si esplorerà questo periodico come importante epicentro di diffusione di estetica controculturale – svolta attraverso fumetti, reportage, articoli di inchiesta e di critica – su un piano di produzione e distribuzione nazionale. [more]

Seeing like Dante: Similis and the Reader's Eye

Research Seminar
In this illustrated lecture, Bill Sherman will introduce his recent work on reading—and readers’ responses—as a visual rather than verbal phenomenon. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, in fact, there are all kinds of overlooked traces of visual responses to texts, from isolated doodles to fully fledged illustrative schemes. But we have never really known what to do with them, or even what to call them. [more]

Once upon a time… Reflections on the Links Between Art, Folklore and National Mythologies in the Early 20th Century Balkans

Brancusi’s work Maiastra will be the starting point of a reflection on the perception and reception of artworks inspired by folk tales and national mythologies in early 20th Century Balkans. [more]

Black and White in Marble: an African Soldier for the Floor of Siena Cathedral

Research Seminar
“The most opposite of all are white and black, since nothing equals the look of black ink against white paper.” With these words Lodovico Dolce (1565) conceptualised the two ends of the colour spectrum. But what was the period’s understanding of black and white when applied to skin colour? Did the artistic practices carried out in workshops influence how Italian Renaissance artists understood skin tone? [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (4th Research Seminar): Seeing through Madness: A Roman Holiday

Research Seminar
Inspired by Nietzsche’s remark that "madness in individuals is somewhat rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule", the book studies the representation of mental disorders across the media, ancient and modern. [more]

Research Seminar Series: "Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins"

1. Research Seminar: “Integration through Exhibition. On Large-scale Art Shows in Cold-War Divided Europe”
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]

Past and Present Witnesses for Political Dissent in Belarus — Unofficial and Official Monuments in Dialogue

Research Seminar
The research seminar is dedicated to public monuments and the way they reflect and construct historical narratives. Its focus lies on the case study of Belarus, where contemporary artists engage with official monumental sculpture through critical interventions. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (3rd Research Seminar): Starting from Water. Ecological Reflections in the Mosaics of San Marco

Research Seminar
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Static Pictures, Living Portraits: Repainting, Conservation, and the Ontology of Images

Research Seminars Series "Conserving Histories of Art"
Portraiture, Alberti said, promises a permanence across time and space. Early modern artists and audiences had other ideas, though: they frequently interfered with ‘finished’ portraits. Carefully attending to the historical practices behind repainted portraits can help guide approaches to their conservation. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (2nd Research Seminar): Southern Discomfort - Art and Abjection at the Birth of a Discipline

Research Seminar
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]
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