Events

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

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]

«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]

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]

Alessia Rollo. Visual Narratives of the Italian South

Research Exhibition curated by Viviana Costagliola
Visual Narratives of the Italian South features a selection of archival materials from the Archivio Publifoto (Gallerie d’Italia, Torino) and the Archivio Franco Pinna (Roma) in dialogue with works from Alessia Rollo’s Parallel Eyes project. The exhibition is part of Viviana Costagliola's postdoctoral research project “Viaggio al Sud” The Representation of Southern Italy in Photographic Reportage and Tourism Promotion Photography after World War II, supported by the Michalsky department. [more]

Confluenze Digitali: Tutela, valorizzazione, fruizione condivisa del patrimonio artistico aquilano

Conferenza
Accesso, tutela e fruizione di patrimonio culturale dell’Aquila tramite l’aggregazione di dati provenienti da biblioteche, musei, istituti e la loro condivisione su Wikidata. [more]

Proxy Wooings and Weddings. From Shakespeare to Rubens

Henriette Hertz Lecture
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]

Ways of Landscape: Jean Epstein’s Film Practice and Theory

Screening (April 23, 2024 at 20:00), International Workshop (April 24, 2024)
What did the eruptive landscape of Mount Etna represent for Jean Epstein – one of the most important personalities of the French avant-garde – when the film company Pathé sent him to film the lava flow in 1923? This workshop aims to reflect on the abundant and continually stimulating questions that come from the intertwining of Epstein’s film practice and visual theory. [more]
The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin owns two spectacular albums with around 160 drawings by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), executed in Rome between 1532 and 1536/37. During these years he wandered through the city, visited collections of antiquities, made pilgrimages to the holy sites, and filled his sketchbook with drawings. [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]

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]

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]

Art in Times of War and Peace: Legacies of Early Modern Loot and Repair

A category of objects that exists entirely as a function of violence, the term ‘loot’ describes a relationship of possession, if not more specifically of dispossession. Neither an historically nor materially specific typology of artifacts, loot is instead primarily a legal category that cuts across place and time. And while it is also not an art-historical classification, it is one with which the discipline of art history must constantly contend, given its repercussions for what is accessible, where, and in what condition. [more]

Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions

This conference brings together almost five years of research from the Max Planck Research Group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions.” The Research Group has compared different scientific disciplines of the late medieval and early modern periods, from anatomy to the study of magnetism. [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]

New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion

In the historiography of the philosopher, mathematician, and Minim theologian Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), 2024 marks 91 years since the publication of the first volume of his Correspondance, 81 years since Robert Lenoble’s trailblazing biography, and 36 years since Peter Dear’s revisionist study of Mersenne and the Jesuit milieu that produced his “deliberately unrevolutionary” scholarship in a rather revolutionary period. [more]
Go to Editor View