The Transnational History of Art History
Based on the ongoing project examining the global reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) and the publication of his Complete Works, both of great importance for the study of Italian art, the history of art history should be conceived in a transnational perspective as a migration of the ideas, texts and also of the authors themselves.
A further component is a critical reflection on the globalisation of historical and contemporary research methods and technologies, such as photographs and image databases. Exploring the early scholarship about Indian art, for example, leads to new questions about form and formalism, of the role of geometric abstraction as a modern universal language of art, and artistic research and art history, which have their roots in classical Italian art and art theory.
The goal is to inspire a critical history of methods, theory and research that places Italian art, architecture and art theory of the early modern period in the focus of transnational aesthetic discourses and within the framework of a geography of concepts and terms.