Vessels beyond Containment

Vessels beyond Containment is a long-term collaborative research project concerned with all kinds of vessels and containers, their materiality, shape and decoration, their functions and agency, their biographies and itineraries. The project is the next step in the research focus on concepts and theories, relations and constellations of image and object (Ding/Bild).

Storia dell'arte e catastrofi: L'italia sismica (sta-sis)

Un progetto transdisciplinare incentrato sul ruolo della storia dell’arte negli scenari post-catastrofe, con un’attenzione particolare al paesaggio e al patrimonio culturale italiani.

Ecology and Aesthetics. Environmental Approaches in Art History (e/ae)

Ecological and aesthetic theories are intertwined in multiple ways. The project opens a dialogue with archeology, anthropology and history of science concerned with the "anthropocene", rethinking the nature/culture divide in a transcultural perspective, including notions of heritage and sustainability, creation and consumption.

Sacred Landscapes:
Between Materiality, Transportability and Narration (Jerusalem Project)

Sacred Landscapes, in particular deserts and mountains are liminal spaces and also places of aesthetic production or response. Their dimensions are material, narrative and iconic, and they are connected to monumental sacred sites. The long-term Jerusalem project is concerned with all these aspects and analyses the ways in which they are intertwined.

The Southern Caucasus Regions: Heritage, Landscape and Narratives

The Southern Caucasus region (between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) encompasses Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, including territories located in...

Iconologies and Iconospheres of the Sea, ca. 1200–1650, III: Liquid Materialities

The project investigates the interdependencies of art and nature and the production of knowledge in mainly Western, pre-modern worlds, by studying the...

Ship Ex-Voto as Objects, Metaphors and Figures of Communality, from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

A canvas by the French artist Ulysse Butin, presented at the Salon in Paris in 1881, sentimentally evokes a maritime votive scenario showing a young l...

Transregional Art Histories. Actors, Spaces, Ecologies from the 13th Century to the Present

Die Research Group widmet sich der Geschichte der Kunst und der ästhetischen Praktiken aus transregionaler und ökologischer Perspektive. Mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der Materialität werden Kunstwerke oder ästhetische Praktiken im Verhältnis zu Orten, Räumen und Umgebungen untersucht.

Vasaris Welten und die deutsche kommentierte Ausgabe der 'Vite' in den beiden Editionen von 1550 und 1568

Das Werk und Denken Giorgio Vasaris bildet für die europäische Kunstwissenschaft bis heute das wichtigste Referenzmodell und einen konstanten methodol...

Rinascimento conteso

'Rinascimento conteso' aims to construct a dialogue with challenges to the historiographical paradigm of a supposedly triumphant Renaissance, responding to sound criticisms of the term’s elitist connotations.

Ethik und Architektur

Das Spektrum der Fragen nach dem Verhältnis von Ethik und Architektur ist breit. Es reicht von der Vitruv- und Aristotelesrezeption des Trecento über Überlegungen zur moralischen Dimension von Architektur im 18. Jahrhundert bis hin zur aktuellen Theorie und Praxis des Bauens.

Photography as Instrument and Medium of Art History

Historically grown photographic archives such as the Photothek are not merely repositories of visual information, but complex epistemic infrastructures that reflect the conceptual and methodological developments of the discipline of art history.

Photo Archives

'Photo Archives' ist eine offene wissenschaftliche Veranstaltungsreihe, die sich Fragen der Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Fotoarchiven, Fotografie und akademischen Disziplinen widmet.

CENOBIUM - Ein Projekt zur multimedialen Darstellung romanischer Kreuzgangkapitelle im Mittelmeerraum

CENOBIUM verfolgt das Ziel, einen Beitrag zur Analyse der komplexen Dynamiken künstlerischen Austausches im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert zu leisten und bedient sich dabei hochauflösender Digitalfotografie, Video, 3D-Scanning und einer interaktiven Weboberfläche.

Il Progetto EUPLOOS

Il Progetto Euploos intende promuovere un dialogo internazionale tra la comunità dei ricercatori e degli studiosi offrendo uno strumento di ricerca in...

Etho-Ästhetiken des Visuellen

The relationships between art, visuality, and ethics – and their ongoing historical transformations – are at the centre of the research group’s invest...

The City as Archive. Histories of Collecting and Archiving in and the Musealisation of Florence, Eighteenth Century to the Present

In November 1916 a spectacular auction took place in the city of New York, when the art dealer, collector and trained artist Elia Volpi (1858–1938) so...

Die Erbauung der Seele. Leon Battista Albertis Dialog Über die Seelenruhe

Das Projekt widmet sich der ersten deutschen Übersetzung und Kommentierung von Leon Battista Albertis Dialog Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III, au...

Perspektivwechsel: Kunst und Philosophie nach Wittgenstein

Im Vorwort zu den Philosophischen Untersuchungen beschreibt Ludwig Wittgenstein das Resultat seiner langjährigen Denkbewegungen wie folgt: "Die philos...

Zwischen Ethos und Exzess? Eine Kritik des Erhabenen

"Le sublime est à la mode" – Jean-François Lyotards 1984 formulierter Satz scheint heute keine Gültigkeit mehr zu besitzen. Gerade in den Visual&...

Action ǀ Retraction: Czechoslovak Art and Philosophy in the International Context, 1945–1989

In view of the historical revisionism increasingly manifest in recent years within post-socialist countries and beyond, it is necessary to re-engage E...

4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (2019–2023)

Eine Kooperation des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut, und der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz zusammen mit der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und dem Forum Transregionale Studien

4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics

4A_Lab möchte einen neuen Dialog zwischen Kunstgeschichte, Archäologie, Ethnologie und Ästhetik und anderen Disziplinen in Gang bringen mit Blick auf Objekte, Praktiken, Ökologien und Narrationen.

Digital Humanities Lab

The Digital Humanities Laboratory (DH Lab) is an interdisciplinary research center within the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz that focuses on in...

Materiality and (In-)Visibility: Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces

This trans-disciplinary project explores the multiple presences of women within socialist and post-socialist public spaces, focusing on their represen...

The Aesthetics of Marble

The project combines geo-aesthetics with an exploration of the metaphorical and transmaterial dimension of marble. The historical focus spans from Late Antiquity to the twenty-first century, looking at certain “marble moments”, mostly in the history of architecture, such as Roman and Byzantine wall decoration, early Omayyad art, Venetian medieval marble cladding, Roman baroque chapels, and the early twentieth century rethinking of wall decoration.

The Ligurian Complex. Case Studies in Ecology and Aesthetics

The project examines the complex overlaying and interpenetration of horizontal, vertical, or entangled spaces in Liguria, which are a challenge for an art historical investigation of both the production of landscape, terraforming, the interaction of human and non-human factors, and their aesthetics.

A Heritage Observatory of Socialist Worlds

This project focuses on the artistic, visual, and material culture of the former Soviet Union and Socialist worlds. Reflecting on the profoundly different realities of the States that were part of the Soviet sphere, as well as on the historiography and narratives, including ideological ones, that have affected issues of museography, restoration, protection and valorization, the project contributes to the understanding of architecture, art and heritage in the twentieth century.

Heritage, Art History, Tourism (H.A.T.)

H.A.T. was launched in 2019 as a platform for transdisciplinary conversations and research on the entanglement between heritage, art history, and tourism in a global horizon. The project is concerned with landscapes and territory, and with historical and contemporary dynamics of archaeology, architecture, site management and exploitation.

The Space of Childhood: The Adler Collection between Architecture, Art, History, Pedagogy and Creativity

This project studies a recent donation to the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan: the unpublished correspondence of the architects Hedwig Feldmann and Hans Edward Adler, dating back to their stay in the USSR from 1930 to 1933, as well as their collection of 257 Soviet children’s books, most of which were published between the 1920s and 1933.

Practices of Imagination

Against the backdrop of contemporary debates over the creative potential and embodiment of cognitive processes, imagination, a concept that according ...

Phenomenon ‘Colour’: Aesthetics – Epistemology – Politics

Colour and its perception is dependent on a variety of subjective predispositions and external physical conditions, and is decisively determined by so...

Photo-Objects, Cultural Displays, Archival Performance, and Rhetorics of Value

Archival gestures emerge as choreographic practices that reveal the active role of archivists within a supposedly neutral archival space. These performative presentations of photographic objects foster new forms of storytelling and enable imaginative, socially engaged approaches to archival materials.

Objects of Migration, Photo-Objects of Art History: Encounters in an Archive

Objects of Migration, Photo-Objects of Art History: Encounters in an Archive is a joint project by the Photothek and the artist Massimo Ricciardo. It links questions of the archive with burning issues of global migration, rhetorics of value and cultural heritage.

„La duplice polarità estetica e storica“ – Methode, Ästhetik und Funktion der Fotografien im Werk der Restauratorin Barbara Schleicher

Die international renommierte Restauratorin Barbara Schleicher (1937–2024) war in den Jahren 1960–2014 vor allem für Denkmalbehörden, Kirchen und Museen in der Toskana tätig.

Studies on the Photography, Laboratory, and Archival Practice of Anton Hautmann around 1860

Anton Hautmann, who was born in Munich in 1821, settled in Florence as a sculptor in 1849, where he was also active as a photographer from 1858 until his death in 1862. As one of the pioneers of stereoscopic photography, he is best known for his views of Florentine architecture and the cityscape.

On Alinari: Archive in Transition

Artist Armin Linke participates in a dialogue between theory and practice that examines and questions the process of institutionalizing photographic archives.

The Photographers’ Sales Catalogue Collection of the Photothek

Photographers’ Sales Catalogues are essential sources for the study of professional photographers, photographic ateliers as well as the photographs themselves since they contain important information concerning techniques, circulation, dating and attribution.

The King’s Finger, the Mermaid’s Body and the Power of the Sea

 This project explores aspects of the transformative power of art by looking at a pair of medieval gloves. Among its particularly rare and precio...

Cultural Possessions

 The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is a complex legal structure that serves as the subject of this art historical and artistic investigat...

Empires, Environments, Objects

Max-Planck Partner Group 2022-2027
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima – Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Sounds of Melancholy

Die „Farben“ der Melancholie standen im elisabethanischen Zeitalter hoch im Kurs bei Philosophen und Dichtern, in der Kunst und in der Musik: 88 versc...

OSCOP – Observing South Caucasus’ Historical Landscape: An Open Photo Archive

The OSCOP project aims to critically recover the collection of photographs on the cultural heritage of the South Caucasus taken in the Soviet period by scholars working at the Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena, founded in Milan by Adriano Alpago Novello in 1976.

Coded Objects

"Coded Objects" stellt als methodische Perspektive jegliche Annahme "neutraler" Technologie oder immaterieller Bürokratie in Frage. Stattdessen untersucht die Lise-Meitner-Gruppe, wie Prozesse durch Objekte Werte formen—und wie Objekte wiederum gesellschaftliche Prozesse formatieren.

Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge (Architecture's Archives)

In architecture, the construction of disciplinary knowledge has been bound to the making of objects and their processes—be it plans, models, sketches or renderings—and their subsequent preservation: what the archive holds informs the histories that are written. In order to question its seemingly stable categories and include marginalized makers, the Lise Meitner Group’s project embraces fragile objects as a way to understand how disciplinary knowledge has been coded.

The Intelligence of Loss in the Archive

Archives are core sites of destruction, decay, and loss—whether through man-made causes or so-called natural disasters, much of humanity’s stored material has been, and continues to be, eradicated. But what if we treated forgetting not as a bug, but as a feature? While AI is hailed as a promise against loss, its own processes of erasure follow distinct patterns, revealing new ways of managing archival sustainability. This project approaches the intersection of archival disappearance and AI-driven erasure, reframing loss as a promise of other ways of knowing.

Hidden in Plain Sight

An Installation of Archive Objects. Oil Paintings, varying DIN formats. Files from the saai archive are stripped of their archival value: all information is removed, at least all textual one. Instead, what we see is their carrying material, namely, different paper formats. By translating archival files into a currency long dominated art historical discourse and production—the oil painting—questions of value become suddenly transposed, as well. Can we forego the primate of the values given and reconceive what we are looking for—which may be hidden in plain sight?

Nation of Norms: Designing German Worldviews One Object at a Time

Objects shape how one touches and views one’s world. This book traces histories where regulated objecst and standardized processes became instruments toward materializing a new worldview, and follows actors who attempted to reshape a German nation on paper, time and time again.

The Matter of Metadata: Archival Constructs between Index Cards and AI

If you were to browse through the complete catalog of the saai, one would find works by over 200 offices and architects—yet only a few of them are women, or involve practices and spaces created for or by marginalized groups or diverse actors. If metadata are understood as objects, as are their processes, infrastructures and consequences, then techniques for their virtual indexing can be learned from the human-made information from collected objects. Only by critically examining the archive's material techniques and value systems can blind spots be revealed—and addressed in AI applications.

Impact Research in Architecture and Urbanism

The DFG network “Impact Research in Architecture and Urbanism” meets regularly to develop and test methodological approaches, in addressing unclear concepts of impact at work in the built environment. In collaboration with the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects”, it develops experimental methods for studying the objects that shape our environments and brings together scattered knowledge across disciplines.

Trading Zones. Art and Philosophy in Eastern Europe since 1945

The project investigates the trading zone between artistic and aesthetic practice and philosophical ideas in Central and Eastern Europe. The relations...

Rethinking the (Post-)Socialist Body: Art, Theory, and Politics

The body has long served as a central site of struggle in Eastern European politics and aesthetics. Shifting socio-political conditions – including th...

Genealogies of Inactivity in Eastern Europe after 1945

The project explores various forms and practices of inaction in Eastern Europe, challenging the common assumption that inactivity is simply the absenc...

Humanism between Ideal and Ideology

Reflecting on the “human human being” in Karl Marx’s early writings (Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, 1844), and extending to present-day discou...

The Art of AI: Rethinking Notions of Creativity, Aesthetics, and Ethics

This project explores the aesthetic and ethical dimension of AI, seeking to unravel its intricate cultural fabric by re-evaluating and challenging con...

Visualising Drugs & Dyes. Art and Pharmacology in Medieval Worlds, 600–1400

Plants, among other things, have long shaped the material practice and imagination of pharmacy. Far more than animals or minerals, plants and their pr...

Decay, Persistence, Re-Possession. Ecologies of Cultural Heritage

The Max Planck Heritage Network is a collaboration of researchers from five Max Planck Institutes (MPI of Geoanthropology, Jena; MPI for the History o...

Modernisms and Organicism: Dialogues between Art, Philosophy and Science

At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘life’ and ‘nature’ established themselves as all-encompassing categories. Organicism, particularly in its ...

The Bibliophilic Networks of Umberto Saba and the Serlupi Crescenzi Collection: Provenance, Collecting Practices, and the Circulation of Books between Trieste and Florence (1920–1950)

This project investigates the bibliophilic and commercial connections between the poet-bookseller Umberto Saba (1883–1957), the Florentine antiquarian...

Art Histories / Catastrophes / (Heritage) / Ecologies [AC(H)E]

Connected Teams Practicing Transcultural Art Histories under the Conditions of Ecological Crises and Digital Transformations: India, Latin America, and Europe

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut with 4A_Lab, Berlin; Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; Departamento de Historia del Arte, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá

The Polycentric Renaissance. Local Identities and Global Connections

The project explores global connections within a very defined context, that of the Iberian monarchy between the 15th and the 17th century. I...

Archipelago. Memory, Trade, and Art in the Mediterranean Islands

The project investigates the network formed by the islands, both large and small, across the Mediterranean. The project considers in parallel the inte...

Communicating Art History Today

The project confronts the challenge of transferring complex art historical research to audiences with different cultural and cognitive skills, fosteri...

Borders

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...

“Coded Objects” Artistic Archival Residency with the Ambiguous Standards Institute (ASI)

Organized by Anna-Maria Meister and the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” in collaboration with the saai | Archive for Architecture and Engineering, KIT Karlsruhe and the KHI Historical Archive