"Renacimiento...": Ángel Guido, Orientación espiritual de la arquitectura en América; Rosario, Talleres gráficos La Tierra, 1927.

Department Weddigen

Art of the Modern Age in a Global Context

The research focus of the department lies on the global ramifications of Italian art from the early modern period to modernism, in the expansion of the Bibliotheca Hertziana's research activities toward modern and contemporary art, in questions of materiality and mediality, in the intellectual history of the discipline of art history and in digital art history.

Research focus

Rome Contemporary
The research area Rome Contemporary focuses on reevaluating Rome as a hub of artistic production in the 20th and 21st centuries. more
Materiality and Mediality
Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning.  more
Italy in a Global Context
The focus on Italy in a Global Context aims to recast our understanding of Italian art and its reception by studying artistic developments that occurred outside of the predominantly urban centers of the Italian peninsula. more
The Transnational History of Art History
The global reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History and the ongoing publication of his Complete Works, which have served as the pillars of this research focus, are used to conceive of the history of art history in a transnational perspective as a migration of ideas, texts, and authors. more
Digital Visual Studies
Digital Visual Studies addresses questions that have arisen from developments in the digital humanities. more

Projects

The #ScienceForUkraine Initiative
March 1, 2022, the Bibliotheca Hertziana has condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine and published a call for doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships for researchers in the field of art history who are at risk in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, independently from their nationality. more
Now we have seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy
Now we have seen is a project dedicated to analysis of the relationship between women and art in 1970s Italy. Taking inspiration from a sentence in the Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (1970) – “we have been looking for 4000 years: now we have seen!” – the aim of the project is to investigate the phenomenon of women artists’ rising awareness and their need for a change of pace declared through the actions belonging to the semantic field of sight “look at”, “see”, taken as paradigms for a decisive turn from passive to active actions. more
Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture: From Nation Building to Now
Art and visual culture contributed extensively to consolidating the process of nation building in modern Italy, which intersects with the policies of colonial expansion of the new Italian State.
This research unit focuses on works of art, images, and objects that actively participated in the development and affirmation of a colonial collective imaginary based on artificial constructions of identity and otherness, orientalisms within and outside of the nation, transnational diplomatic relations and migrations. more
Bellori Edition Project
Giovan Pietro Bellori's The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects published in 1672 is one of the most important and influential source texts of the 17th century. The unbroken research interest proves the undisputed significance of Bellori's writings long appreciated both for its literary complexity and as a source for methodological and art-historiographical research as much as for its documentary qualities. more
Heinrich Wölfflin – Complete Works
Art theory in the years around 1900 explored the foundations of aesthetic production and reception. more
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