Among the early medieval illuminated manuscripts of the ninth century, the De laudibus sanctae crucis (Cod. Reg. Lat 124) by Hrabanus Maurus offers one of the most complex interplays of image-text relationships based on carmina figurata . It unfolds different levels and strategies of figuration. The specific aspects and qualities of its iconic practice can be described as a kind of coding. The coded subject and leitmotif of the cycle, which affects and gives structure to all other miniatures, is the central figure of Christus triumphans . The essay focuses on the detailed description and analysis of this symbiotic dynamic of a figural impulse that combines seeing, reading, and imagination into a meta-concept of figuration.

April 1, 2016

Caravaggios Medusenschild von 1597 – ein Gorgoneion?

Constanze Hager

Page range: 44-62

Abstract

Caravaggio’s emblematic Medusa is mostly regarded as a representation of the mirrored decapitation of the Gorgon and thus as a reflection on Perseus’ protective shield. This essay proposes a new interpretation: Caravaggio’s Medusa is an adaptation of the antique Gorgoneion . The Gorgoneion historically depicted Medusa’s head with its petrifying gaze, which was placed on the shield of Athena. Due to its symbolic and protective power, the Gorgoneion became a frequent subject in art and handicraft well into Baroque art. Caravaggio’s contemporaries – including the poets Gaspare Murtola and Giambattista Marino – left witness that they interpreted the image as a Gorgoneion . In addition, the image itself contains elements that buttress this interpretation, including, inter alia, the green surface of the shield and the shadow. Both the historic accounts and the painted details therefore render an interpretation of the painting as Gorgoneion very likely.

April 1, 2016

Giulio Mancini e la nascita della connoisseurship

Stefano Pierguidi

Page range: 63-71

Abstract

The role of Giulio Mancini as the father of connoisseurship has been recently questioned on the grounds that Mancini never aimed to discuss the attributions of contemporary works of art. Generally the birth of modern connoisseurship , with figures such as the Richardson brothers, has been linked to the growing art market of the 18th century, and the most important 17th-century forerunners, such as Marco Boschini, acted as dealers as well: all these connoisseurs dealt with the attributions of paintings of the previous centuries. This paper explores the roots of connoisseurship in the topography work of Mancini, author of the first modern artistic guide to Rome. Mancini, studying the early Renaissance frescoes in Rome (Jacopo Ripanda, Pastura, Pinturicchio, Baldassarre Peruzzi), discussed Vasari’s biographies and suggested new attributions with a modern approach that clearly anticipates the method of later connoisseurs .

April 1, 2016

A Self-Portrait as Landscape Painter: Caspar David Friedrich and Phrenology

Nina Amstutz

Page range: 72-91

Abstract

A Self-Portrait as Landscape Painter: Caspar David Friedrich and Phrenology The article explores a precocious moment of interest in how the brain mediates aesthetic perception. Around 1810, Caspar David Friedrich drew himself with several features that deviate from his earlier self-portraits, including two bumps between the brows at the root of the nose. These cranial protuberances were associated with a cognitive faculty that the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall insisted is common among landscape painters: Ortssinn , characterized by a heightened ability to remember places and to measure distance and perspective. I argue that Friedrich’s drawing is a self-portrait as landscape painter , where the signifiers of identity are no longer conventional artistic or sartorial attributes but rather the contours of the cranium and, by implication, the fabric of the artist’s mind.

April 1, 2016

Deutsch-deutsche Kunstgeschichte am Beispiel von Hanne Darboven und Werner Tübke

Hans Dickel

Page range: 92-114

Abstract

Deutsch-deutsche Kunstgeschichte am Beispiel von Hanne Darboven und Werner Tübke The histories of art in former East and West Germany have been described as evolving synchronously. This article, arguing from another point of view, analyzes two works from the 1980s, both of them outstanding in purpose and size: Werner Tübke’s monumental painting Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland in the Museum Bad Frankenhausen (formerly GDR) and Hanne Darboven’s Bismarckzeit in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (FRG). The investigation into their subjects, forms, and contents within their historical contexts – the period of Erich Honecker’s claim for a socialist tradition and Helmut Schmidt’s Realpolitik , respectively – reveals a greater distinctness grounded on different concepts of art, i.e., anti-modern (Tübke) versus modernist (Darboven). Nevertheless, in their view of German history a common kind of scepticism about teleology may be discerned, which is based on the artists’ shared experiences of Germany’s disastrous contribution to the twentieth century.

Miszellen

April 1, 2016

Ein Relief mit der Geißelung Christi im Kulturhistorischen Museum Stralsund und einige Bemerkungen zu einer niederländischen Werkgruppe aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts

Peter Knüvener

Page range: 115-124

Abstract

Ein Relief mit der Geißelung Christi im Kulturhistorischen Museum Stralsund und einige Bemerkungen zu einer niederländischen Werkgruppe aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts The collection of the Stralsund Kulturhistorisches Museum contains a hitherto almost undocumented carved relief of the Flagellation of Christ. Its style suggests that it belongs to a group of widely disseminated works of Flemish origin. For example, similar stylistic details can be observed in the retables of the Capela da Santo Antão da Faniqueira in Portugal, and the Aegidienkirche, now in the St. Annen-Museum, Lübeck. This article will argue that the carvings of the Heiligenthaler altarpiece in the church of St. Nikolai in Lüneburg, traditionally held to be locally produced work, should also be reattributed to this group of works. Consequently, the attribution of a further relief illustrating the Temptation of Christ in the collection of the Liebieghaus Museum (Frankfurt a. M.), also currently regarded as having originated in Lüneburg, should be reconsidered in light of this new classification.

Buchbesprechungen

April 1, 2016

The Making of Assisi. The Pope, the Franciscans, and the Painting of the Basilica

Serena Romano

Page range: 125-127

April 1, 2016

Das Selbst im Anderen. Sprachen der Freundschaft und die Kunst des Porträts 1370 – 1520

Fabiana Cazzola

Page range: 128-133

April 1, 2016

Gebaute Entfestigung. Architekturen der Öffnung im Turin des frühen 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts

Britta Hentschel

Page range: 133-139

April 1, 2016

Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century

Martin Hartung

Page range: 139-143

About this journal

About this journal

Starting 2023, the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte will be transferred to Diamond Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. There will be no publication costs for the authors. The Open Access transformation is based on Subscribe-to-Open, an alternative model that enables the full Open Access transformation of journals through the continuation of existing subscriptions. The prerequisite for successful transformation is that subscriptions are continued to the same extent as before. The editors of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and the publisher De Gruyter would therefore like to thank all subscribers for their support, which has made the transformation to Open Access possible.

History and scope

Founded by Wilhelm Waetzold and Ernst Gall in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte is published quarterly by Deutscher Kunstverlag. As the leading international German-language journal of art history it is one of the foremost periodicals of the academic discipline world-wide. Scholarly articles undergo a double-blind peer review by two independent experts; contributions are accepted in German, English, French, and Italian.

The Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte is a journal covering the whole range of art-historical matters. It offers a space for contributions dealing with all epochs and subjects, and using all methodical approaches. Open to art-historians from all points of the compass, it should at the same time serve to retain the polyglot nature of the discipline.

Organisation

The editorial office of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte is located at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Since January 2020, Gerrit Walczak is Managing Editor.

The publisher delegates editorship to five Editors covering different areas of the discipline. For the sake of openness and plurality, Editors will generally serve for five years. The annual withdrawal of a member of the editorial board, and the subsequent by-election of a new Editor, assures steady change while maintaining continuity.

The Editors are nominated by an advisory committee, whose members are recruited from the institutes of art history at German universities, or operating outside higher education, and from the three German art historical research establishments at Florence, Paris, and Rome. Each institute or research establishment is invited to send a representative. Additionally, the board of directors of the Deutscher Verband für Kunstgeschichte, the directorate of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and Deutscher Kunstverlag are represented each by a consultative member. All members serve on the committe for six years unless their term is extended.

Submissions

The Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte accepts only contributions that have not been published elsewhere. Submissions are welcome in German, English, French, and Italian. Translations of essays either previously published or about to be published as well as outtakes from books in the making will not be processed. The editorial office assumes that articles and reviews are not parallely submitted to other journals. Articles will first be assessed by the editorial office and the editorial board, then passed on anonymously to two external referees.