Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Erwin Panofsky’s assertions in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960) that a new historical consciousness and a quest for an ‘all’antica’ idiom was manifest in the art and architecture of the period are routinely reiterated in art historical narratives.
By formally analyzing fifteenth-century visual culture, however, questions can be raised about what the artists and architects of the period actually used as their models and how they understood and studied the past.
This lecture juxtaposes the conventional definitions of the Renaissance, through its endeavors to revive or renew Roman Antiquity, with observations of paintings and buildings of the fifteenth century in order to reconsider the characteristics of Italian visual culture of the time.
By discussing the Renaissance and its relation to the past, I will critically assess the art historical ambition to demonstrate revivals of antiquity and map ancient Roman sources of inspiration, which have otherwise been paradigmatic in the academic discipline through the past centuries.

Maria Fabricius Hansen is Professor in art history at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her primary field of research is Italian art and architecture from late antiquity until c. 1600, with a focus on concepts of the past, eclecticism, and representations of time, particularly the understanding and appropriation of antiquity, published, for instance, in: "Representing the Past: The Concept and Study of Antique Architecture in 15th-Century Italy", Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, XXIII, 1996, pp. 83-116, The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. Supplementum XXXIII), Rom: “L'Erma” di Bretschneider, 2003, The Spolia Churches of Rome: Recycling Antiquity in the Middle Ages, Aarhus: Aaarhus  University Press, 2015.
She writes about contemporary art and architecture as well.
Presently, she is involved in a research project on fireworks and festivities at courts in Denmark and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Her recent publications include: The Art of Transformation: Grotesques in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, IL (Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2018), Rome: An Architectural History (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2022), a survey of European architecture from antiquity to the present day, but with examples only from Rome, illustrated with drawings and cartoons by graphic novelist Lars Horneman.

Publication and activities, please see: https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/staff/?pure=en/persons/163300

[Caption: Filippo Brunelleschi Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence. Photo: Maria Fabricius Hansen]