Category Archives: Projects

The new Corpus of Baroque Ceiling Painting in Germany


Stephan Hoppe and Ute Engel

Corpus der barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland (CbDD). Erfassung, Analyse und digitale Publikation der architekturgebundenen Malerei (ca. 1550-1800) auf dem Gebiet der heutigen Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Academies´ Programme, Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities

Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities

Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich, 2015–2039

Project Director: Prof. Dr. Stephan Hoppe, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

Teamleader Marburg: Prof. Dr. Hubert Locher, Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (DDK), Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Philipps Universität Marburg

Project Coordinator, Teamleader Munich: PD Dr. Ute Engel, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

The new Corpus der barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland (CbDD) started in 2015 as a long-term research project funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities (Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissenschaften) and intended to last for 25 years, i.e. until 2039. The project is directed by Prof. Dr. Stephan Hoppe (Munich) and consists of two work units:

one based at the Department of History of Art, Munich University (LMU);

one based at the Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte (DDK) – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Department of History of Art, Marburg University.

The CbDD continues the former Corpus der barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland, which was initiated by Prof. Dr. Hermann Bauer (†) and Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rupprecht (†) in 1966 and undertook a survey of the baroque ceiling paintings in Upper Bavaria, published in 15 volumes 1976–2010. The project was guided by Prof. Dr. Frank Büttner (†) from 1994 to 2010. In 2012, Prof. Dr. Frank Büttner and his successor at the Institute of Art History at LMU University, Prof. Dr. Stephan Hoppe, together with Prof. Dr. Hubert Locher and Dr. Christian Bracht of the Philipps-Universität Marburg, applied successfully for the continuation of the CbDD within the German Academies´Programme.

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Continent Allegories in the Baroque Age – A Research Database

A brief introduction by Dr. Marion Romberg from the Austrian research project „Erdteilallegorien im Barockzeitalter” at the University of Vienna’s Department of History

Link to the database: http://continentallegories.univie.ac.at

Visual Examples of continent allegories in the database (Screenshot)

During the late Renaissance – around 1570 – humanists developed a new “shorthand” way of representing the world at a single glance: personifications of the four continents Europe, Asia, Africa and America. While the continent allegory as an iconic type had already been invented in antiquity, humanists and their artists adapted the concept by creating the four-continent scheme and standardized the attributes characterizing the continents. During the next 230 years until ca. 1800, this iconic scheme became a huge success story. All known media were employed to bring the four continent allegories into the public and into people’s homes. Within this prolonged history of personifications of the continents, the peak was reached in the Late Baroque, and especially the 18th century. As a pictorial language they were interwoven with texts, dogmas, narratives and stereotypes. Thus the project team find himself asking: What did continent allegories actually mean to people living in the Baroque age?

The geographical dissemination of continent allegories in the South of the Holy Roman Empire (Screenshot)

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Mural Painting in the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database

Recently, several thousand photos of church interiors from Southern Germany have been uploaded into the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (http://iconographic.warburg.sas.ac.uk), where they can be freely downloaded. Some 20,000 more images are waiting to be added. It is planned to link this collection with the Corpus der Barocken Deckenmalerei.

Following the principles of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, the metadata focusses on iconography. We describe subject-matter in a hierarchical system that allows us to place related subject-matters next to each other. In contrast to ICONCLASS, our system is flexible so that we can easily create new categories to describe innovative iconographies, which are so common in the Baroque. We include material in all media and from all countries (with a focus on Europe from Classical Greece to about 1800), so allowing users to note connections across time, space and materials. An entry on a painting in the crossing of Fürstenfeld Abbey may give an idea of our approach:

furstenfeldbruck

In addition to presenting our own photographs (up to now, only the sections on Mythology and Astrology of our Photo Collection have been systematically digitized), we also collaborate with other projects to make digitized material findable through iconographic classification. We have therefore evolved from being a digital photo collection towards a global iconographic research portal. A good example are our entries on some illuminated manuscripts from the Munich Staatsbibliothek, such as the Salzburg Missal.

Because European mural paintings often contain rich and complex iconographies and are comparatively little known, we would be very interested in collaborating with projects that are engaged in cataloguing them.

photographic.collect@sas.ac.uk

Image at the top: Schäftlarn Abbey

Die visuelle Kultur der Habsburgischen Repräsentation

Die visuelle Kultur der Habsburgischen Repräsentation – ein Forschungsschwerpunkt
des Instituts für Kunst- und Musikhistorische Forschungen an der ÖAW Wien

Werner Telesko / Herbert Karner

Das Generalthema des Schwerpunktes ist die visuelle Kultur der habsburgischen Repräsentation und der Versuch, diese in ihren unterschiedlichsten Ausformungen zu entschlüsseln. Unter „Repräsentation“ verstehen wir die Vergegenwärtigung von Abwesendem durch unterschiedliche Medien (z.B. durch Wappen, Bilder, Skulpturen, Medaillen, Deckenmalereien), aber auch durch symbolische Interaktion bzw. statische oder performative Kommunikation (Architektur, Raumordnung, Einzug des Herrschers, Fest). Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, in welcher Weise habsburgische Repräsentationsstrategien in Kunst und Architektur in den Österreichischen Erblanden sowie in den böhmischen Ländern und Ungarn zum Ausdruck kommen. Continue reading Die visuelle Kultur der Habsburgischen Repräsentation

Image, Communication, Behaviour

Centre for Cross-Disciplinary Research into Cultural Phenomena in the Central European History: Image, Communication, Behaviour

by Michaela Šeferisová Loudová and Radka Nokkala Miltová, Seminar of Art History, Masaryk University in Brno

The main objective of the centre is a cross-disciplinary analysis and interpretation of mechanisms, which may explain the cultural-historical reality throughout its long duration from the Middle Ages up to the resent. The centre intends to develop a synergistic link between research teams in the cultural-historical field at universities in Brno and Olomouc, which have for some time now been prominent in their use of such approaches. In addition there is also the intention to draw on cooperation with the most important Czech Republic researchers as well as with leading experts abroad (Wroclaw, Vienna, Paris, Lausanne). In this sense the project endeavours to link up various methodological approaches with subjects in the field, which will be monitored within the particular modules: The theory and practice of cultural-historical disciplines; Image, cult, space; Imagination, image and text; Representation, places of memory. Outputs from the project will be a series of monographs, articles and a final, methodologically targeted volume, in which all the modules will be involved.

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