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Horst Bredekamp at a conference in March 2015 in Düsseldorf

Horst Bredekamp (born 29 April 1947, in Kiel) is a German art historian and visual historian.

Life and work

Bredekamp studied art history, archaeology, philosophy and sociology in Kiel, Munich, Berlin and Marburg. In 1974 he received his doctorate at the Philipps-Universität Marburg with a thesis on art as a medium of social conflicts, especially the "Bilderkämpfe" of late antiquity to the Hussite revolution. He worked first as a volunteer at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt am Main, from 1976 as assistant in the division of Art History at the University of Hamburg.

In 1982 he was appointed professor of art history at the University of Hamburg, in 1993 he moved to the Humboldt University Berlin. Since 2003 he has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, in 2005 the Gadamer-endowed chair.[1] Bredekamp was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1991), Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1992), Getty Center, Los Angeles (1995 and 1998) and the Collegium Budapest (1999).

The research foci of Horst Bredekamp are iconoclasm, Romanesque sculpture, art of the Renaissance and mannerism, political iconography, art and technology, new media. In the course of his move to Berlin, Bredekamp supported the incorporation of the Census research project into the Humboldt University.[2] In 2000 he founded the project "The Technical Image" at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Centre for Cultural Techniques (HZK) of the Humboldt University Berlin, which developed under his leadership visually critical methods, a theory of pictorial knowledge in the fields of science and technology and medical visualizations. From 2008 to 2018 Bredekamp was co-founder and director of the DFG-Kolleg research group "Image Act and embodiment" ("Bildakt und Verkörperung") at Humboldt University Berlin.

In 2007, Bredekamp's monograph Galilei der Künstler [Galileo the artists] appeared in German newspapers. This monograph was based on the discovery of an edition of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius including unknown Galileo-attributed ink drawings. After a thorough inspection including material technical studies, Bredekamp and his co-authors declared this newly discovered work to be the genuine work of Galileo.[3][4] In 2012, historian Nick Wilding discovered that this copy was, in fact, a forgery which had been brought by the Italian antiquarian and convicted criminal Marino Massimo De Caro in the U.S. antique trade.[5][6]

From 2012 to 2018, together with Wolfgang Schäffner, Bredekamp served as speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at the Humboldt University in the second phase of the German Universities Excellence Initiative.[7] The research project operated as an interdisciplinary laboratory that brought together Humanities, Natural and Technical Sciences, as well as Medical and – for the first time in basic research – Design and Architecture.

Subsequently, since 2019, both Bredekamp and Schäffner are Directors of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material”. The cluster investigates the culture of materials in the digital age and is composed of researchers from more than 40 disciplines.

From the spring of 2015 until 2018 he served, next to the British museum director Neil MacGregor (director) and the archaeologist Hermann Parzinger, as one of the three founding director of the future Humboldt Forum in the walls of the reconstructed Berliner Stadtschloss.[8] He emphasizes a collection history that is based on the Cabinet of Curiosities as a world museum, where collections of initially foreign objects act as means for critical self-reflection and offers for understanding ‘the other’. This connection to a decidedly anticolonial tradition of collecting was argued most recently in Bredekamp’s book “Aby Warburg der Indianer” (2019, German).

Bildwissenschaft

Bredekamp is known for his work in the field of Bildwissenschaft ("image science", see also Visual Culture), a subdiscipline of art history founded by Aby Warburg. which considers the cognitive functions performed by the image , the question of a stylistic history of scientific imagery, and the role played by visual argumentation during the Scientific Revolution.[9] His interests lay in the implementation of image-critical methods and theories of visual cognition from the fields of scientific, technical and medical imaging. Both the scientific journal Bildwelten des Wissens (since 2003) and the compendium The Technical Image (2015) result from this research. Focusing primarily on images that fall outside of a narrowly defined idea of art, such as those used in the works of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the scientists Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei, Bredekamp argues that images inculcate a particular kind of understanding that could not be formed without them.[10] Bredekamp criticises the idea, associated with Klaus Sachs-Hombach [de], that Bildwissenschaft might be constructed by amassing the pre-existing insights of various disciplines, arguing that a new science cannot be straightforwardly established through the adding together of existing disciplines.[11] Against Sachs-Hombach's argument that art history is one of many disciplines on which Bildwissenschaft should draw, and Hans Belting's argument that art history is outdated or obsolescent, Bredekamp argues that (Austro-German) art history has always contained an incipiently universal orientation and a focus on non-art images.[12]

Personal life

In April 2023, Bredekamp was one of the 22 personal guests at the ceremony in which former Chancellor Angela Merkel was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for special achievement by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin.[13]

Publications

Monographs:

Much of Bredekamp's work has been translated into other languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Estonian and Hungarian.[14]

As editor(selection):

Honors and Prizes

References

  1. ^ "Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp". Humboldt University Berlin. Retrieved 28 June 2011.
  2. ^ "History of the Census" In: http://www.census.de/census/project?set_language=en
  3. ^ Irene Brückle, Oliver Hahn, Paul Needham, Horst Bredekamp (Hrsg.), Galileo’s O, Akademie Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005095-9.
  4. ^ Stefano Gattei in Book Reviews on the History of Science, December 10, 2012: Horst Bredekamp (ed.), Galileo's O Archived 2014-01-04 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ^ Elisabetta Povoledo: At Root of Italy Library’s Plunder, a Tale of Entrenched Practices, The New York Times, August 11, 2012.
  6. ^ Nicholas Schmidle: “A Very Rare Book”. The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise, The New Yorker, December 16, 2013.
  7. ^ "Exzellenzcluster "Bild Wissen Gestaltung" – Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte – HU Berlin". www.kunstgeschichte.hu-berlin.de.
  8. ^ "Grütters stellt Gründungsintendanz für Humboldtforum vor". berlin.de.
  9. ^ Rampley, Matthew (2012). "Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-Language Scholarship". In Rampley, Matthew; Lenain, Thierry; Locher, Hubert; Pinotti, Andrea; Schoell-Glass, Charlotte; Zijlmans, Kitty (eds.). Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks. Brill Publishers. p. 130.
  10. ^ Craven, David (2014). "The New German Art History: From Ideological Critique and the Warburg Renaissance to the Bildwissenschaft of the Three Bs". Art in Translation. 6 (2): 144. doi:10.2752/175613114X13998876655059. S2CID 192985575.
  11. ^ Gaiger, Jason (2014). "The Idea of a Universal Bildwissenschaft". Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetic. LI (2): 211.
  12. ^ Gaiger 2014, p. 214.
  13. ^ Kati Degenhardt (17 April 2023), Merkels emotionaler Dank: "Er hatte Vieles auszuhalten" T-Online.
  14. ^ "Horst Bredekamp (English)".
  15. ^ "Laurea Honoris Causa in filosofia a Horst Bredekamp".
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