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. Starting from these texts, the project expands invites critical reflection on the globalization of historical and contemporary research methods and technologies, such as photographs and image databases. Exploring early scholarship on Indian art, for example, leads to new questions about form and formalism, 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 context of transnational aesthetic discourses and within the framework of a geography of concepts and terms.