Events

Literary and Cultural Circulation Between Italy and Brazil

Workshop
As part of the 2024 celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of Italian emigration to Brazil, this workshop will explore the artistic and cultural ties between the two nations from the turn of the 20th century to the present. [more]

New Fellows’ Presentations

Founded in 1913, the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History comprises of the departments “Cities and Spaces in Premodernity” led by Prof. Dr. Tanja Michalsky and “Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context” led by Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen, alongside Drs. Sietske Fransen and Francesca Borgo’s research groups “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” and “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History”, respectively. Each department and research group hosts an international group of pre- and postdoctoral fellows undertaking research that spans a vast array of methodologies, chronologies, and geographies to tackle issues at the cutting edge of the field. [more]

Sensorial Encounters: Haptic and Non-Visual Access in Art

Workshop
Sensorial Encounters: Haptic and Non-Visual Access in Art is an exploratory workshop that challenges the primacy of visual perception and terminology in art and art history. Inspired by the methodological insights of authors such as Georgina Kleege, Elizabeth Bearden and Amanda Cachia, among others, this workshop que stions the traditional conflation of sight with knowledge. [more]

Form, Style, Principles: Art Historical and Theoretical Reflections – A Conference of the Wölfflin Edition

Conference
Recent discussions in aesthetics and art history, literature, and visual studies have seen a renewed interest in questions of form and formalism. Whether in connection with algorithmic thinking, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, or with transcultural comparisons, revised narratives of modernism, re-conceptualisations of formlessness, and cognitive reflections on connoisseurship, form and formalism have regained currency in current discourses on a transhistorical and transdisciplinary level. It has become clear that an “archaeology of knowledge” about these crucial notions is indispensable in teasing out their critical potential and in productive application of what has also been termed “new formalism” or “post-formalism”. [more]

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]

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]

AI & Cities 2024. Digital Double: Situating and Troubling AI Technologies for Architectural Reconstruction and Urban Simulation

Workshop
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]

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]

Digital Research Infrastructures for Art History

Workshop
Presentation of recent Initiatives at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris (INHA) with a Lecture of Federico Nurra, Head of the Digital Research Service at INHA. [more]

The Fabrication of the King: Charles Le Brun Reflecting on the Textile Medium

Semester Opening Lecture
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]

Identità plurali e alterità spaziali dell’italianità 1796-1943: territori, città, architetture, musei

Conferenza
Il Convegno Internazionale di Studi si svolge nell’ambito del Progetto di ricerca Spazidentità. Spazialità materiale e immateriale dell’italianità dalla Repubblica Cisalpina al Fascismo : territori, città, architetture, musei. Programmes structurants, École française de Rome, 2022-2026. Axe Thématique : Création, patrimoine, mémoire [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]

Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

Conference
In the early modern period, throughout the process of negotiation that gave shape to sainthood – whether officially recognized or aspirational – images were of paramount importance. Encompassing a wide range of media, from inexpensive medals and woodcuts to costly altarpieces, images were as crucial at the grassroots level of popular devotion as in the context of elite patronage. The conference Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism investigates the role of images in generating, defining, and recognizing sainthood across cultures in the wake of Catholicism’s global expansion during the period of Iberian hegemony (c. 1500–1700). [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]

New Fellows’ Presentation

The Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History comprises two departments and two research groups with a great variety of methodological, historical, and geographical perspectives and themes, ranging from “Cities and Spaces in Premodernity” to “Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context”, and from “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” to “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History”. The Institute hosts fellows from diverse regions and backgrounds both at a pre-doc and a post-doc level. [more]

Towards a Novel Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome II

Workshop
The purpose of our 2nd workshop is to focus on co-creation towards a joint product via productive discussions and/or ad-hoc working groups. Possible products include a joint cartography that captures the coverage of available information from antiquity to the present, and a roadmap for the research community. While we provide a foundation, participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas and data! [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]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (8th Research Seminar): Jerusalem in Rome, Constantinople, and Venice: Four Cities and the Idea of a ‘Holy of Holies’

Research Seminar
This seminar is devoted to an exploration of three cities that claimed the title of being a New Jerusalem. More specifically, we will explore aspects of the rise and development of the Christian veneration of saints and relics as a decidedly urban phenomenon in the cities of Constantinople, Rome, and Venice from the late antique to the early modern period. [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]

Now we have seen. Women and Art in 1970s Italy

Conference
The event represents the final stage of the eponymous project launched by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome in 2022 and concluded with the publication of a collective volume of the same name dedicated to the relationship between art and feminism in 1970s Italy. [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]

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]

Datathink 2024 / AI & Cities: Sampling the Past, Interpreting the Present in Future Tense

Winter school exploring emerging intersections of artificial intelligence, machine learning, urban studies, urban landscape, and architectural and urban history. [more]

Art and Feminism in Italy in the 1970s

Field Seminar
As part of the Italian Council 11 project Now We Have Seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy, a thematic tour is organized at the exhibition Cooking Cleaning Caring. Care Work in the Arts since 1960, held at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop in cooperation with the Institute of Art History at the Ruhr University Bochum and curated by Linda Walther and Friederike Sigler with Monja Drossmann and Tonia Andresen. [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]

«Post Scriptum» | Grégory Sugnaux – Solo Exhibition

Research Exhibition curated by Lara Demori
Art Fellow Grégory Sugnaux presents the corpus of works he has produced during his residency at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, delving into the archives, the photographic collection, and the library. Resulting from the project “Shape-Shifting: Transfiguring Art History”, Sugnaux’s solo show will take place on the ground floor of Palazzo Zuccari, yet it will include media material recorded at the “La Cage aux Folles”, a former showroom at the beginning of the 20th century that became a Club in the 1970s.Pursuing the legacy of Aby Warburg’s Iconology, Sugnaux’s project aims to rethink art history through images that mediate between high, popular, and punk culture. [more]

New Fellows’ Presentation

Workshop
The Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History comprises two departments and two research groups with a great variety of methodological, historical, and geographical perspectives and themes, ranging from “Cities and Spaces in the Middle Ages” to “Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context”, and from “Visualising Science in Media Revolution” to “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History”. The Institute hosts fellows from diverse regions and backgrounds both at a pre-doc and a post-doc level. [more]

The Worksite in the 16th Century: Architecture and Decoration. Fontainebleau

International Study Seminar
The seminar will examine the case of the decoration at the Château of Fontainebleau, a central episode in 16th-century artistic culture in Europe, within the framework of the international research project I cantieri in Europa nel Cinquecento: architettura e decorazione, now at its second stage after the session on Rome held in 2019. Seventy years after the exhibition Fontainebleau e la Maniera italiana (Naples 1952), it is time to return to the artistic relations between Italy and France from the point of view of this important matter, examining the transmission of techniques, languages, artists, craftsmen, and its consequences in both directions. [more]

New Leisure for a New Nation. Art and Entertainment in Italy, from Nation-building to Liberation (1861-1945)

Workshop
The aim of the workshop is to analyze how the relationship between artistic representations and new forms of entertainment contributed to the construction of Italian identities during the nation-building process. Particular emphasis will be placed on aspects related to gender, the exhibited and spectacularised body, race and colonial dynamics, as well as regionalisms and the social and class differences that entertainment has contributed to normalising and/or transgressing. [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]

Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy | Mauro Staccioli: Consolidare un’eredità artistica

Research exhibition curated by Marica Antonucci
Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy | Mauro Staccioli: Consolidare un’eredità artistica (18 October 2023 – 19 January 2024) examines the work of Mauro Staccioli through a selection of archival materials. The exhibition is curated by Marica Antonucci. [more]

Scultura italiana dal secondo dopoguerra agli anni Ottanta

Workshop
Il workshop “Scultura italiana dal dopoguerra agli anni Ottanta” — in occasione della mostra “Mauro Staccioli: Cementing a Legacy” presso Bibliotheca Hertziana — mira ad approfondire aspetti meno studiati e controversi della scultura italiana del secondo dopoguerra, prendendo come punto di partenza l’opera di Mauro Staccioli in tutte le sue sfaccettature. [more]

Research Seminar Series "Methodology and Ideology: Critical Perspectives on the Historical Paradigms of Art History" (7th Research Seminar): Mandrake. A Natural History of Image Making

Research Seminar
Mandrakes mark the boundary of nature and art. They were coveted objects for medicine, natural history, magic and collections. Supposedly, these human-like roots grow naturally. However, in the early modern period, it was also common knowledge that they were often faked. [more]

Media Histories of Sculpture

Workshop
As Marshall McLuhan argued in his seminal Understanding Media, the “hybridizing or compounding” of media “offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties.” This workshop seeks to explore sculpture’s intermedial entanglements and asks what these may reveal about the medium of sculpture. [more]

Memorie coloniali e Nation Building. Italia e Germania a confronto

Convegno
L’Europa ha fatto realmente i conti con la sua storia coloniale? Italia e Germania, protagonisti tardivi della scramble for Africa, hanno davvero prodotto colonialismi minori? E oggi questi due paesi come si confrontano con quel passato, in che modo agiscono sulla memoria discorsiva e visuale, partecipando alla costruzione della loro narrazione nazionale? [more]

Giulio Romano - Intorno a un disegno della Collezione Hertz

Research Exhibition
This research exhibition focuses on one of Giulio Romano's preparatory drawings for the famous fresco cycle created for the great hall of the Villa Lante on the Janiculum Hill, today preserved in Palazzo Zuccari. The recent restoration of the drawing The Liberation of Cloelia (in the collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana) has provided an opportunity to highlight the special appreciation for Italian Renaissance art of Henriette Hertz, cosmopolitan collector, and the founder of the Bibliotheca Hertziana. [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]

Hertziana App Release

Presentation
Discover the Bibliotheca Hertziana with new eyes! On July 10, 2023, the Hertziana app will be released, enabling you to immerse yourself in the Institute's buildings, furnishings and architectural decoration through novel augmented reality technology. [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]

Towards a Collaborative Cultural Analysis of the City of Rome

Workshop
The purpose of the workshop is to explore the state-of-the-art and the joint emerging opportunities towards a perhaps radically novel, collaborative, and multidisciplinary understanding of the city of Rome, as imagined, represented, and enacted in historical sources and modern data. [more]

Now we have seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy

Workshop
A thematic and methodological comparison between the participants and with the public preparatory to the publication of the homonymous collective volume, scheduled for spring 2024, dedicated to the relationship between art and feminism in 1970s Italy. [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]

Gnoseology, Aesthesis, Decoloniality

Lecture
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]

Shoptalks

In the Shoptalks, the Fellows of the Bibliotheca Hertziana present their Research Projects. [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]

Art and Power School

International Workshop
The Art and Power School is part of the Project Art and Power: Decolonizing Art History, which addresses the need to identify and analyze visual regimes and to critically reflect on the construction of power as a strategy of social dominance. [more]

The Notion of Renaissance, Between History and Myth. Origins, Transformations, New-Perspectives

Conference
The conference will explore the many ways the concept of the Renaissance has been viewed over the centuries, with a focus on the key figures, artistic practices and paradigms that have helped keep it alive for five hundred years. [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]

Elena Subach: Hidden

Research Exhibition
A research exhibition of photographic works by Ukrainian artist Elena Subach. The featured series was created in spring 2022 when museum workers and volunteers all over the country rushed to protect cultural heritage in the wake of the escalation of the Russian military aggression. From April 20-July 3, 2023 [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]

Immortal Egypt. The Afterlife of Egypt in Early Modern Visual Arts

Conference
These study days will question the complex interaction between continuity, discontinuity, survival and rebirth by employing the epistemological tools of art history, visual anthropology and the history of ideas in order to reflect on the heritage, as well as on the creative processes that have ensured the posterity of a strange, complex, changing, close and distant Antiquity. [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]

Image Systems and Urban Spatio-Temporal Navigation

Lecture
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]

DATATHINK 2023. The City as Collection: Building an Augmented Database for the Humanities

Hands-on approach to engaging with a digital workflow and data pipeline for the collection, processing, contextualization, visualization, and spatialization of a database of public monuments in the city of Rome. Python + georeferenced data + image analytics + Machine Learning. [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]

Christoph Keller: Data Error – Roma Antichità

Research Exhibition
From February 16 until April 14, 2023, the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome will host the exhibition Data Error – Roma Antichità by visual and conceptual artist Christoph Keller. Data Error – Roma Antichità is a series of framed digital collages installed on exhibition walls under the Mannerist frescos of Palazzo Zuccari. [more]

Neobaroque Modern: Oscar Niemeyer and the Construction of a Brazilian Identity

Spring Term Opening Lecture
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]

(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]

Connected Constellations. Networks of Artistic and Political Solidarity with Chile

Workshop
In light of recent studies on artistic and political solidarity movements, this workshop proposes to connect a series of practices that emerged in the Euro-American context during the 1970s and 1980s. The starting point for this reflection is situated in Chile during the period of Augusto Pinochet's civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) and takes into consideration its historical, political and cultural precedents. [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]

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]

Fumetti underground tra ricerca e festival mainstream

Workshop
Questo Workshop pone a tema diverse tendenze storiche e contemporanee del fumetto underground, riunendo prospettive di ricerca accademica, attività creativa e divulgazione attraverso eventi culturali di portata nazionale e internazionale. Contenitore elastico, il fumetto underground indica sia una categoria estetica adatta ad esprimere diverse istanze autoriali (genere e tradizione di riferimento sul piano narrativo e visuale, esplorazione di determinati contenuti, stilistica), che una serie di pratiche di produzione e distribuzione alternative alla stampa istituzionale che esercitano una sostanziale influenza sul mondo del fumetto mainstream. [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]

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]

Describing Ukraine: Cartography and Travelogues

Exhibition online
An exhibition by the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History as part of the #ScienceForUkraine initiative. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Bibliotheca Hertziana has offered doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships to at-risk art historians from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus as a contribution to the international #ScienceForUkraine initiative. [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]

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]

The Voices, Sounds, and Images of Europe

Interdisciplinary Conference
Organised within the framework of the European Pavilion in Rome and dedicated to the many voices, languages and images that make up Europe, this afternoon at Bibliotheca Hertziana is divided into three programmes that combine presentations, listening sessions and exchanges with the guests and amongst the audience. [more]

The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes: Art History, Conservation, Material Science

Workshop
The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes is a collaborative multi-disciplinary project that has begun a comprehensive technical study of all of Bernini’s complete oeuvre in bronze. In the past year, the travelling team has studied bronzes in North American and Australian museums and will continue technical studies in Europe in 2023-2026. [more]

Massimo Piersanti e gli Incontri Internazionali d’Arte

Mostra fotografica
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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]

Screening & Artist Talk with Mykola Ridnyi

This film seminar presents a screening of Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari and its research material, followed by an artist talk and public discussion. Russia’s attack on its neighbor is driven by a nationalist ideology, yet Russian propaganda justifies the invasion as one aimed against “fascists”. Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari (21 min, 2021) tackles this subject. [more]

Bilderwirtschaft: Fotografie als Ware und Material der Kunstgeschichte um 1900

Workshop
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Tra Pompei e Marajó: cultura materiale, patrimoni del passato e debiti del presente

Research & Field Seminar
Teresa Cristina di Borbone delle Due Sicilie fu la terza e ultima imperatrice del Brasile. Responsabile dei dialoghi culturali tra l’Italia e il suo paese di adozione, lasciò al Brasile un’importante eredità: la Collezione Mediterranea del Museu Nacional da Quinta da Boa Vista che subì un gravissimo incendio nel 2018. [more]

Spazialità e identità in Italia (1796-1943). Definizione e metodologia

Quali sono le qualità attribuite allo spazio, a quello della città, degli edifici, dei musei, nella lenta costituzione di una “identità nazionale” italiana durante l’Ottocento fino agli anni del fascismo? In che modo la spazialità contribuisce a forgiare l’identità? [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]

Images of War / War of Images: Politics of Visuality during Russian Invasion in Ukraine

Conference
The panel seeks to explore the visuality of the Russian-Ukrainian War, how its images are constructed and distributed, how they function within the social and political contexts, how they shape and transform those contexts, what antagonisms, continuities and discontinuities they create. [more]
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