Contexts, Communities, Connections.
New Narratives in History of Art
Abteilung Bianca de Divitiis
The department focuses on global culture through the study of the history of art and architecture between the late medieval and modern periods. It places Italy in dialogue with Europe, the Mediterranean, the Iberian Americas, and the rest of the world, through a transdisciplinary approach.
Over the coming years, the department will deal with two fundamental challenges: reconciling the advancement of art-historical research with broader themes connected to urgent contemporary problems; continuing and reviving the established tradition of early modern and modern studies, bringing to the fore the complexity of the Renaissance and its polycentric and global nature, as well as its appeal and ability to speak to younger generations.
The title of the department encapsulates the key concepts with which projects, labs and actions will face these challenges. New narratives in the history of art will be reconstructing the socio-historical and physical contexts around works of art, architecture, artifacts. They will shift the attention – too often directed to authorship and to single individuals – towards a plural and choral sense of art and to the agency of communities, both past and present, understanding their local challenges as well as their global ones. Furthermore, new narratives will work to re-establish connecting threads by combining a deep on-site and philological knowledge of specific territories, with insights from global and universal approaches, considering local and global as mutually and simultaneously intersecting dimensions.
The department's research projects, digital labs and on-site actions focus on the early modern and modern period, but with a strong contemporary perspective. They adopt a multi-scale and horizontal approach, between micro and global history, open to contemporary themes, scalable into the medium- and long-term. They are carried out by interdisciplinary research groups, bringing art history into dialogue with other disciplines (history, philology, neuroscience, biology), while contemporary art is regarded as essential to reading history in unforeseen ways and in making art history part of a growing awareness of present urgencies.
Research Trajectories and Projects
The Polycentric Renaissance. Local Identities and Global Connections explores global connections within a very defined context, that of the Iberian monarchy between the 15th and the 17th century. It will trace connections between viceroyal kingdoms, from the Mediterranean to Central and South America, which despite their geographical distances were bound together as part of the same world, sharing the same bureaucratic system, same norms, and representations. It considers connections in conceptions of the past, from two different perspectives: on the one hand, that of the destruction and hispanicization of monuments relevant to the local identity of lands; on the other, the strenuous efforts of local communities who used material and documentary traces of their past to face the threat of losing identity within a global empire. Such connections will globalize our understanding of the Italian Renaissance, including Florence. The aim is also to create a premise from which new generations can engage with cultural traditions and heritage which have hitherto been seen as distant and foreign, transforming a shared past into a common present.
Archipelago. Memory, Trade, and Art in the Mediterranean Islands investigates the network formed by the islands, both large and small, across the Mediterranean. The project considers in parallel the internal complexity of the large islands, each of which has its own orography, local antiquities, stratified past, conflicting cultures and even borders; at the same time it considers their nature as connected worlds that relate to one another and to the facing shores of Europe, Africa, and Anatolia. While tracing possible convergences and divergences between commercial and cultural exchanges, which involved also northern Europe, the project considers how local communities faced urgent technical challenges, some from the past, such as moving ships, and others which were important in the past and remain so today, such as the supply of water.
Reflecting on the nature of islands within the frame of the Anthropocene and blue thinking, the project addresses the ethical problems of recounting the role of islands caught between overtourism and their role as transit destination in journeys of refugees and migrants along the deadliest migration route of the 21st century.
Communicating Art History Today confronts the challenge of transferring complex art historical research to audiences with different cultural and cognitive skills, fostering accessibility and social, cognitive, and physical inclusivity. This project looks both at the potential of digital projects, such as display strategies from established collections to flexible and experimental displays, such as City Museums, which can help citizens, especially vulnerable groups, to better understand the place in which they live, to penetrate the complexity of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, to discover the connecting potential of different cultures, as well as to bring value to the history of diverse communities. By exploring new interactions between art and neuroscience, it also looks into the potential of heritage in supporting wayfinding and spatial orientation for Alzheimer patients. It explores the double potential of built and natural monuments as agents of memory, that is, how monuments of the place in which you live and on which your identity is grounded can become parts of a healing path.
Borders are a fundamental problem of contemporary life: there is a veritable boom in the building of walls and the fortification of borders around the world. Borders have never been static lines, but are mobile, disputed and invisible; they encompass the physical to the intellectual and cultural but mark the differences between our humanity and all that would seem to deny it or contradict it or aim to replace it. The project considers on the one hand the materiality of marking margins and borders with objects, sculptures, or by carving nature, and on the other hand the political and cognitive implications of the representation of borders on maps and paper, as well as recent bordering techniques which have broken away from the map. It also considers the historical and contemporary presence of visible and invisible borders within the context of cities, with areas or buildings inhabited by minorities or merchant nations, such as today's quarters inhabited by foreign-born communities. In this context the project will observe the internal diversities against the perception of homogeneity. The project also explores the multiple ways, in the past and in the present, of re-creating home abroad, from the means of single objects to ongoing experiments in multicultural housing.
Nature and Antiquarianism looks at how natural elements and natural phenomena were objects of antiquarian investigation, just as ruins and built monuments were. They were also central to the daily life of communities, who regarded natural elements as identity and experienced both the destructive and healing powers of nature. The subsoil is central in this discourse, not only in the search for antiquities, and for its medical properties, such as in international experiences of thermal bathing, but also for the extraction of minerals, as in 16th-century Potosí where mountains were drilled to extract silver. The project will provide a historical perspective on the responses of local communities facing the dramatic changes of landscape determined by global diseases, such as Xylella bacteria, which, from the olive trees of Puglia to the grapevines in California, is dramatically changing landscape, affecting the economy, the psychological well-being and life of vast regions.
Digital Labs
Naturalia & Artificialia in Italian Collections is conceived as an interactive map and corpus of artefacts and naturalistic specimens, which will uncover an overlooked global dimension of the Italian Renaissance and shed new light on aspects of the Italian history of collections and colonizations.
Public Writing is a digital corpus of Late Medieval and Renaissance inscriptions, both carved in stone and written by hand, monolingual and plurilingual. Alongside texts from individuals, it will privilege the public writing produced by groups, such as commissions, devotional texts, collective threats, and statutes regulating the life of communities.
ANTONELLO is an app which enables end-users to get in contact with local communities, allowing them to book the opening of monumental sites that are usually closed and inaccessible with just one click. Developed for the Renaissance heritage of southern Italy, it will be scaled up to cover sites from the hills of Tuscany to the valleys of Bolivia.
Memory Lab uses cutting-edge technology to explore the double meaning of memory connected to monuments, as elements of collective identity which communicate a sense of belonging and as personal memory which can support wayfinding and orientation in patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases.
On-site Actions in Florence
Curatorial Fellowships will be offered for junior scholars who want to gain curatorial experience and for international senior scholars working on an exhibition who would profit from discussing her/his work in progress.
Projects in the Making will create a repository of open data generated during the department's research processes, documenting – in line with Open Science and FAIR principles – the development of new methodologies, making available evaluative, deductive, interpretative, and creative decisions, ensuring the transparency of paradata, as well as helping to monitor projects to achieve their research goals.
Historiography in the Making will expand the existing nucleus of bequests by collecting the audio, visual, and archival materials of art and architectural historians. This will establish the KHI as a point of reference for future generations who will be able to study the scholarly and creative processes, and to experience the voices and gestures, of scholars they were not able to meet.