Events

Whereas drawings only begin to change after they have been drawn, prints can change before, during, and after printing. [more]

Carmen C. Bambach, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will give the opening keynote lecture for “Touched/Retouched: Paper across Time (1400–1800),” a workshop made possible with support from Getty through The Paper Project initiative. [more]

A double, in the figurative sense, refers to a situation or concept that has two possible interpretations. What happens when we transpose this notion of the double into the digital realm, precisely in the context of a digital transition that affects the way we build, govern, and imagine cities? [more]

Until recently the textile medium lacked a theory, which undermined its status as fine art in the academic discourse. However, being silent does not mean that it does not think. In early modern art, tapestry can reveal an aesthetic self-awareness of the textile medium which awaits to be fully explored and unfolded through the close reading and contextualization of works as singular phenomena with a potential of generalization. [more]

The lecture is focused on studying changes in the Medieval urban fabric, interpreting fragments and their interrelationships, and prompting discussion on the limits of well-argued results and their textual and visual representations. [more]

Why does Rubens’s painting of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV lack a portrait of the groom? This paper explores the history of the proxy wedding and the theoretical problems raised by such ceremonies when confronted with expectations of affective bonds between spouses. [more]

In einer später sehr berühmt gewordenen Bildkonfrontation ließ Le Corbusier 1921 Autos auf antike Tempel prallen. Diese gewollte Kollision von Dynamik und Statik sollte die Architekturdiskussionen des 20. Jahrhunderts weit über die Moderne hinaus prägen. [more]

A painter poet and a poet’s painter, Giorgio de Chirico arguably influenced the 20^th century literary imagination more than any other modernist artist. This lecture considers why his art entranced the American poets John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand. [more]

In this lecture, Prof. W.D. Mignolo will address the themes of decolonization and artistic practices, at the invitation of Museo delle Civiltà’s research fellow DAAR – Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal. The lecture is promoted as part of the collaboration between Museo delle Civiltà and the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Research Unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture. [more]

Since the early 19th century, photography has offered a method to fix the fleeting image. Since then, however, we have become aware of the transient character of all photographic materials. [more]

Most histories of the Bauhaus after 1933 describe it as a movement in exile, but the majority of Bauhäusler remained in Germany. This talk focuses on two of its communist photographers who took very different paths of resistance and participation during the Nazi period. [more]

Image Systems, a novel formalism that allows for the conversion of digital image collections into structured datasets, prioritizing the relationship between images rather than metadata. This approach is fruitful in urban spatiotemporal navigation and automated discovery techniques for the digital humanities. [more]

The lecture explores the reuse of the colonial Baroque in the modernist discourse, and more specifically in Oscar Niemeyer’s early architectural work, as a means to forming Brazilian identity. [more]

Der Anspruch, die Kunstgeschichte global zu erweitern, stellt das Fach seit geraumer Zeit in methodischer, inhaltlicher und institutioneller Hinsicht vor große Herausforderungen. Dies tritt etwa mit Blick auf die Öffnung des Gegenstandsbereichs auf außereuropäische Objekte deutlich zutage. Im Zuge dieses Prozesses gilt es, sich folgendem Fragenhorizont zu stellen: Inwiefern ist das an mitteleuropäischen Artefakten erprobte Methoden- und Theorienrepertoire einer global ausgeweiteten Kunstgeschichte noch dienlich? Wie kann die Kunstgeschichtsschreibung vermeiden, vermeintlich längst überwundene koloniale Rhetoriken und Strategien zu reaktivieren? Auf welche Weise lässt sich ästhetische Alterität erfassen, ohne „Andersartigkeit“ zugleich kategorisch festzuschreiben? [more]

The lecture will focus on material culture, that is, the objects in use and the representations of an exceptional community: the Signares, mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée, who, through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, formed an elite. [more]

The thirteenth-century rise of the Mongol Empire brought objects, peoples, and technologies into new and accelerated contact. This lecture explores the impact of this contact in Italian states around 1300, at a moment of intense artistic change. [more]