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Reflection on the history and practice of art history has long been a major topic of research and scholarship, and this volume builds on this tradition by offering a critical survey of many of the major development in the contemporary discipline, such as the impact of digital technologies, the rise of visual studies or new initiatives in conservation theory and practice. Alongside these methodological issues this book addresses the mostly neglected question of the impact of national contexts on the development of the discipline. Taking a wide range of case studies, this book examines the impact of the specific national political, institutional and ideological demands on the practice of art history. The result is an account that both draws out common features and also highlights the differences and the plurality of practices that together constitute art history as a discipline. Matthew Rampley is Professsor in the History of Art of the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on aesthetics and the historiography of art, with a particular focus on Nietzsche, Warburg, Riegl and the Vienna School of Art History, and is associate editor of the Journal of Art Historiography.

Thierry Lenain is Professor of Art Theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Published works include studies of forgery, monkey painting and the image in Deleuze, Foucault and Lyotard.

Hubert Locher is Professor of the History and Theory of the Image, and Director of the German Art Historical Documentation Centre of the Philipps University, Marburg. Alongside work on the Renaissance, specifically, Alberti, Raphael and Ghirlandaio, he has also written and edited numerous books on museum and exhibitionary practice, art theory and the historiography of art.

Andrea Pinotti is Professor of Philosophy at the Università degli Studi, Milan. He has written widely on German nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics and its place within the historiography of art, including books on Riegl, Warburg and Walter Benjamin.

Charlotte Schoell-Glass is Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg. A member of the editorial board of Word & Image, her research interests focus on the relation between image and text, and she has also published on Aby Warburg, including a critical edition of the Diary of the Warburg Library in Hamburg and a study of Warburg and anti-Semitism.

Kitty Zijlmans is Director of the Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines. Her main areas of research and publication have been contemporary art, the theory and methodologies of art history and world art studies as a new disciplinary paradigm.

BRILL’S STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 212

BRILL’S STUDIES ON ART, ART HISTORY, AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 4

ISSN 0920-8607 brill.nl/BSIH

BRILL’S STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 212

BRILL’S STUDIES ON ART, ART HISTORY, AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 4

Edited by

MATTHEW RAMPLEY, THIERRY LENAIN,

HUBERT LOCHER, ANDREA PINOTTI,

CHARLOTTE SCHOELL-GLASS & KITTY ZIJLMANS

Subseries Editor: ROBERT ZWIJNENBERG

ART HISTORY AND VISUAL STUDIES IN EUROPE

TRANSNATIONAL DISCOURSES

AND NATIONAL FRAMEWORKS

Art History and Visual Studies in Europe

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Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History

General Editor

Han van Ruler, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Founded by

Arjo Vanderjagt

Editorial Board

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Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History,

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Art History and Visual Studiesin Europe

Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks

Edited by

Matthew RampleyThierry LenainHubert LocherAndrea Pinotti

Charlotte Schoell-GlassKitty Zijlmans

LEIDEN$•$BOSTON!%"!

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This book was supported by funds made available by the European Science Foundation (ESF), which was established in 1974 to provide a common platform for its Member Organisations to advance European research collaboration and explore new directions for research.

This publication was supported by grants from the Aby Warburg-Stiftung and the Hamburgische Wissenschaftlich Stiftung, both in Hamburg.

Cover illustration: Elliott Erwitt. Personal. 1996. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos.

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Colenbrander

CONTENTS

List of Contributors$ ........................................................................................ ixPreface and Acknowledgements$ ................................................................ xv

Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Matthew Rampley and Kitty Zijlmans

Introduction$ ..................................................................................................... 0Matthew Rampley

PART ONE

METHODS, DEBATES AND PARADIGMS

Art History, Aesthetics and Art Criticism$ ............................................... 01Antonio Somaini

The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History$ .......... 23Hubert Locher

European Heritage: Unity in Diversity?$ ................................................... 40Brian Graham

Contemporary Art and the Concept of Art History: In56uence, Dependency and Challenge$ .................................................................... 73Peter J. Schneemann

Formalism and the History of Style$ .......................................................... 17Andrea Pinotti

Visual Culture and Visual Studies$ .............................................................. 30Jan Baetens

Theories of the Image in France: Between Art History and Visual Anthropology$ ................................................................................. 081Ralph Dekoninck

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vi 9:;<=;<>

Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-Language Scholarship$ ................................................................................................... 003Matthew Rampley

Computerization, Digitization and the Internet$ ................................... 0?7Antonella Sbrilli

Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and Science$ .......................................................................................................... 070Erma Hermens

Dimensions of Dialogue: Art History and the Discourse of Economics$ .................................................................................................... 0@1Victor Ginsburgh and François Mairesse

Sociologies of Art: With and against Art History$ .................................. 0A7Nathalie Heinich

Museums and Museologies$ .......................................................................... 031Dominique Poulot

Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies$ ............................... 201Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans

The Construction of National Art Histories and the ‘New’ Europe$ ............................................................................................... 2?0Matthew Rampley

PART TWO

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE DISCIPLINE

Cultures of Interruptions. Art History in the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania$ ................................................................................. 243Krista Kodres, Giedrè Mickunaitè and Stella Pel!e

In Search of a Synthesis: Art History in Belgium$ .................................. 217Raphaël Pirenne

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9:;<=;<> vii

Art History in Bulgaria: Institutional Frameworks, Research Directions and Individual Scholars$ ...................................................... 2A1Elka Bakalova

Art History in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Institutional Frameworks, Topics and Loyalties$ ....................................................... ?87Milena Bartlová

Art History in France: A Con56ict of Traditions$ ..................................... ?07Ralph Dekoninck and Joël Roucloux

Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germanyand Switzerland$ .......................................................................................... ??7Charlotte Schoell-Glass

Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland$ ............ ?77Griselda Pollock

Born of a ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: Art History in Greece and Cyprus$............................................................................................................ ?13Areti Adamopoulou

Art History in Italy: Connoisseurship, Academic Scholarship and the Protection of Cultural Heritage$ ............................................. ?3?Laura Iamurri

Art History in the Netherlands: The Past and Present of the Discipline$ ...................................................................................................... 481Marga van Mechelen and Kitty Zijlmans

Art History in the Nordic Countries$ ......................................................... 420Dan Karlholm, Hans Dam Christensen and Matthew Rampley

A Marginalised Tradition? Polish Art History$ ........................................ 4?3Wojciech Ba"us

In Search of National Traditions: Art History in Romania$ ................ 470Corina Teac#

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viii 9:;<=;<>

Art History in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia$ .............. 4@0Nenad Makuljevich

Art History in Spain: A Generational History$ ........................................ 41?Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis

Art History and the Founding of the Modern Turkish State$ ............ 4A7Burcu Dogramaci

Bibliography$ ..................................................................................................... 43?Dennis Janzen

Index$ ................................................................................................................... 74?

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COMPUTERIZATION, DIGITIZATION AND THE INTERNET!

Antonella Sbrilli

Introduction

In the past three decades, the use of computer-based technologies in the many "#elds of scholarship, research, communication and education has seen an unprecedented development. As far as art history and visual stud-ies are concerned, there has been an exponential increase in studies and applications, local experiences and international projects aimed at explor-ing the intersection of these "#elds and digital tools and at remarking the critical points of this relationship.

Innovations that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s are by now widely accepted; concepts such as hypertext and link, immatériaux and multimedia, 3D and virtual restoration, e-learning and folksonomy have entered the lexicon of art historians, while huge digital archives have been implemented and search engines re"#ned. At present, high-quality digital reproductions of artworks enable one to have at one’s disposal accurate zoomable facsimiles, in some cases even showing details not visible to the naked eye on the originals; they can be enhanced by data regarding their context, can be altered and deconstructed. Above all, digital reproductions make it possible to collect together the disiecta membra of artists’ produc-tion, which can be compared, analysed, and computed in many di$ferent ways, in a mutual exchange of philology and informatics, enabling each scholar to build his or her own musée imaginaire, as conceived by André Malraux.%

In the meantime, international organizations have been working to establish standards, protocols, templates, and metadata in order to build a useful and e$fective digital koine while trying to face important problems, such as recognizing reliable resources among the information overload and preventing the same resources from becoming obsolete.

!&The author thanks Nicolette Mandarano, Valerio Eletti (Sapienza University of Rome) and Robert E. Iannazzi for their reading of the text, and Gloria Pasqualetto (Fondazione Cini, Venice) for her courtesy.

%&André Malraux, Museum without Walls (London, 1967). First published in French in 1965.

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The state of the art of digitization of cultural heritage in Europe is mon-itored and promoted by the European Community Minerva Project, a net-work aimed to ‘harmonize activities carried out in digitization of cultural and scienti"#c content for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitization, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation’.1 A further European project will be of enormous importance: ‘Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive’.2 When completely implemented, it will o$fer a prototype multi-lingual website giving users direct access to the digitized archives of a net-work of cultural institutions, containing collections of books, paintings, photographs, sounds, "#lms, manuscripts and other documents regarded as cultural heritage.

The three purposes of the application of informatics, documentary, edi-torial and hermeneutic—which were clearly lined out by the Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, a pioneer of computational linguistics—can also be recognized in the "#eld of art history and visual studies.3 As a mat-ter of fact, computerization, digitization and the Internet have not only impacted on ‘normal’ activities such as reproducing images, cataloguing and "#ling data, editing and publishing documents, and preserving and di$fusing knowledge about art, they have also projected, in some cases, new lines of research. Looking at the past, the use of new technologies has caused analogies and continuities to emerge, stressing some features of traditional techniques and languages: the binary character of drawing; the discrete nature of mosaic; interfaces as a part of the Western per-spectival culture and ‘brainframe’; the nature of light and colour, but also art-historical taxonomies, can be studied through new lenses, all thanks to the knowledge generated by the evolution in current technologies (and an awareness of their limits as well).4 Considering developments at pres-ent, one can say that in the digital world, too, ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts:’ the huge amount of information at our disposal and the

1&http://www.minervaeurope.org/whatis.htm, (accessed 22 May 2010).2&http://www.europeana.eu, launched in November 2008 (accessed 22 May 2010). 3&Roberto A. Busa, ‘Foreword: Perspectives on the Digital Humanities’, in Susan Schreib-

man, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, 2004) xvii.

4&See Corrado Maltese, ‘Linguaggio analogico e linguaggio digitale’, in Il nuovo mondo dell’immagine elettronica, ed. Guido and Teresa Aristarco (Bari, 1985) 27–36, now in Mal-tese, Per una storia dell’immagine: Da Leonardo alla computer art (Roma, 1989) 78–85; with special regard to interface, see: Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (San Francisco, 1997); On brainframe: Derrick de Kerckhove, Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Utrecht, 1991).


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possibility to interact with it makes relevant features emerge that could not have been imagined before, often at the boundary between specializa-tion and large-scale di$fusion.

The key words used to identify images in digital archives, for example, can be considered a semantic cloud around the reproductions of art-works stored in great databases. Thus, the verbal description of artworks ( ekphrasis) meets the necessities of search queries and something new arises, which can be called ‘stenographic electronic ekphrasis:’ an ancient rhetorical device becomes a tool for searching images using a few speci"#c words that synthetically describe iconography, style and details, suggest associations and resume complex art-historical relations using a language borrowed from the form of the database itself.= Users can not only test the e$fectiveness of these descriptions but, with their feedback, they can also enrich connections while building a useful net of words, images, and links from the perspective of folksonomies (collaboratively produced tax-onomies) and social tagging.

In spite of the divisions between more and less enterprising and wealthy institutions and countries, and of the di$"#culties in reaching a united level of development and exchange, digital tools and environments have been proving their capabilities in meeting at least one of the deepest ambi-tions of art history: to connect artworks to a net of di$ferent and evolving interwoven relations which are now accessible to larger and larger groups of competent users.

The Year 2000

During the Thirtieth International Congress of the History of Art, orga-nized in collaboration with important specialized organizations, such as AHWA-AWHA (Art History Webmasters ASSOCIATION des webmestres en histoire de l’art), RIHA (International Association of Research Insti-tutes in the History of Art), and CHArt (Computers and the History of Art Group), one section was devoted to Digital Art History Time.> The detailed

=&A Carracci painting representing Mary Magdalen can be accessed in the Bridgeman Art Library archive, using the following key words: saint; breasts; penitent; skull; book; crying; tears; penance; repentant ; humility; humble; Mary; Magdalen.

>&London, September 3–8, 2000; available online at http://www.unites.uqam.ca/AHWA/Meetings/2000.CIHA/. CHArt, a ‘society open to all who have an interest in the application of computers to the study of art and design’, holds an annual conference and publishes the conference proceedings, see the CHArt Yearbook 2005, Digital Art History: A Subject in


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description of the section clearly pointed out the most relevant "#elds in research and applications, and it is still a useful basis for an outline of this evolving "#eld: ‘Digital imaging and art-historical analysis; Network-ing and databases; Digital media and teaching; Museums and exhibitions; Digital images and global copyright problems.’ Keeping that description as a frame, this chapter will try to illustrate how some of those entries can be relevant for the discipline.? It is of course important to recognize that applications and studies on these topics are growing day by day and some of them often overlap: digital imaging converges with virtual restoration and exhibition; digital archiving with educational systems, while copy-right aspects a$fect many of these items, quickly modifying themselves according to legal and social developments. In every country there has been a deep engagement with the issue of copyright permission protocols on digital images, an issue that is related to global "#le-sharing, creative commons licences, even hacking. The French online publication Images re-vues, has undertaken an extended re@Aection on art history, image pol-icy and publishing in the digital era, including a useful survey by André Gunthert, ‘Le droit aux images à l’ère de la publication électronique’, and a ‘Charte: droit de l’image, droit à l’image’, which aims to extend to images the right of scienti"#c quotation and to introduce uniform laws concerning the reproduction and online di$fusion of art images.!B

Digital Imaging and Art-Historical Analysis

Digital image acquisition and processing in the last decade have become both more accessible and more professional. Following a trend that "#rst emerged in medical image analysis, the traditional two-dimensional

Transition: Exploring Practice in a Network Society (available online at: http://www.chart.ac.uk/, accessed July 1, 2010).

?&In 2000, the collection A Companion to Digital Humanities o$fered an updated sur-vey of the topic. Michael Greenhalgh’s essay ‘Art History’ illustrated the impact of the evolution of the computer on the discipline, presenting the most signi"#cant perspectives and best practices, the di$fusion of software and technical devices, the web resources and the outstanding worldwide academic initiatives and consortia. See Michael Greenhalgh, ‘Art History’, in Schreibman, ed., A Companion to Digital Humanities, 31–45. Also available online at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion (accessed 22 May 2010).

!B&Images re-vues. Histoire, anthropolgie et théorie de l’art (http://imagesrevues.org/, accessed 22 May 2010). A comparative analysis of worldwide legal approaches to electronic copyright, ‘Indagine conoscitiva. Il diritto d’autore sulle reti di comunicazione elettron-ica’, was published in 2010 by the Italian Communication Authority AGCOM (http://www.agcom.it/, accessed 22 May 2010).


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picture, a snapshot of the surface of things, has been replaced by digital representations, made up from discrete elements and layers that can be analysed independently of the whole, manipulated in real time, linked to hypertextual documents, transformed into three-dimensional objects, and di$fused, according to their compression, through the Internet.

This evolution is modifying the archives of cultural institutions all over the world, the forms of publishing, teaching, learning, and the habits of acquiring and comparing images to such a degree that one could claim that, thanks to new technologies, everybody is not only a publisher, but also an iconographic researcher and a curator of numberless museums ‘without walls’. It has also provoked new problems with regard to the compatibility of standards and the possible alteration of originals. And it has refuelled post-Benjaminian debates about the nature of artworks (and of their aura) ‘in the age of their digital reproducibility’, discover-ing new features of the aura itself, in the very characteristics of digital languages and of networking.!! Accomplishing at least one of the intimate potentialities of digitization, great e$forts (both technological and "#nan-cial) have been devoted to realizing the most accurate reproductions of non-transportable, destroyed or inaccessible artworks.

In recent years a number of virtual travelling exhibitions have shown very accurate full-size reproductions of works by great masters, collected together in single real locations. An example of the trend of using digital images of masterpieces in absentia is the full-size facsimile of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, whose original was once in the Palladian Refec-tory on San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Removed by Napoleon and now in the Louvre Museum, the real painting has been scanned and processed in order to obtain as faithful an image as possibile in terms of resolution, colour, shape and visual information. Realized by the Fondazione Cini and the enterprise Factum Arte, directed by the English artist Adam Lowe, the project is intended to assert the value of reproductions—the fruit of detailed rigorous study—as substitutes for absent originals.!% Though very impressive and allowing extreme close-up vision, these enterprises mainly

!!&See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford, 2003); Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, in Benjamin, Selected Writings 3 (1935–1938) (Cambridge, MA, 2002) 101–34.

!%&Il Miracolo di Cana: L’originalità della ri-produzione, http://www.cini.it/it/event/detail/1/12 (accessed 22 May 2010).


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concentrate on the visual characteristics of artworks, capturing all their features and o$fering them to the mere visual perception of the public.

Other research directions consider digital facsimiles as artefacts that exploit the multimedia and interactive potentialities of new digital media; their aim is not to provide a substitute for originals in terms of a visual illusion, but to o$fer a di$ferent object which is made of data and infor-mation that users can share and manipulate. In this perspective, digital reproductions are structured not only as printable images but above all as explorable interfaces, accessible by di$ferent platforms, including mul-tidisciplinary documentation and multiple semantic interpretation. In these terms, the digitized version of an artwork is not intended to com-pete with the original in terms of visualization, but o$fers itself as a distinct representation enhanced by data and interactivity.!1 One example coming from a cross-boundary experience is the digital reproduction of the 1550 Map of Mexico City, the original of which is in Uppsala and whose exact facsimile, realized by a research group in Helsinki, has been enhanced with large quantities of historical, artistic and anthropological informa-tion, which can be explored employing a touchscreen.!2

Digital imaging is necessarily a form of art-historical analysis in the case of virtual restoration. One example of best practice is the computer-aided reconstruction of parts of Mantegna’s frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua, severely damaged during the Second World War. The virtual recon-struction, thanks to a computer programme, repositions the fragments on a map created from photographs of the frescos before the bombing. The so called Progetto Mantegna also o$fers accurate online documentation of the history, the methodology, the structure and the placing of the fresco fragments.!3

Virtual reconstruction, mainly in architecture and archaeology, can make use of immersive virtual reality tools, from the Cave automatic vir-tual environment, giving users the illusion of exploring a three- dimensional space completely enveloping them, to the spatial three-dimensional reconstruction of single places. 3D virtual reality reconstruction can

!1&Antonella Sbrilli, Storia dell’arte in codice binario (Milano, 2001).!2&Lily Díaz-Kommonen, ‘Designing and Producing Digital Cultural Heritage: The Map

of Mexico 1550’, in La Rivista di Engramma on line, 54 (2007) (available online at: http://www.engramma.it/engramma_revolution/54/054_internetumanesimo_messico.html, accessed 14 September 2010). See, by the same author, and dealing with some method-ological aspects, Art, Fact and Artifact (Helsinki, 2002).

!3&See the project website, www.progettomantegna.it/ (accessed 22 May 2010).


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thus be considered a sort of ‘virtual ecosystem’, as in the case of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In order to solve the problems of accessibility to the monument (restricted due to problems of preservation,) a hyper-media environment has been realized where visitors can navigate a 3D virtual reality reconstruction with architectural, painting and contextual information.!4

Digital media have also proven themselves useful in the documentation of artworks realized in non-traditional techniques, such as installations, ready-mades, and interactive devices, that can be better represented by means of digital, multimedia and interactive media than by mere photo-graphs or videos, due to the possibilities of providing multidimensional points of view and the active role of spectators in time. Furthermore, the many international exhibitions of contemporary art can be documented and preserved by means of integrated digital and web resources (see the Artefacta Project aimed at documenting the many world Art Biennials, starting from the Biennale of Venice 2007).!= This is quite apart from con-temporary artworks that have emerged out of the convergence of elec-tronic and digital media, and are the source of so-called ‘new images’. These, intended as the expansions of the dimension of the visible, includ-ing sound, tactile, even thermic elements, are made by numeric code, can be generated by two- and three-dimensional computer graphics and by mixing video shooting and enhanced reality. ‘New images’ can be perceived on di$ferent supports and transform themselves in real time. Finally, they can be located in such a ‘non-place’ as the web itself, and grow thanks to the contributions of communities of users. This conver-gence of technological research, artistic creativeness and cultural heritage has been explored since 1979 by the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz; its annual festival, Ars Electronica, analyses these developments and their impact on contemporary society and culture.!>

Some highly specialized research has been devoted to the problem of automatic image recognition. To recognize an image without verbal descriptions or tags, but by means of its visual features, would be of great practical importance for searching inside huge art databases. But the challenge of automatic recognition would also have an application in expert activities, such as so-called computer-aided attributionism or

!4&See the website of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/home.html (accessed 22 May 2010).

!=&http://www.treccanilab.com/biennale_di_venezia/ (accessed 22 May 2010).!>&http://www.aec.at/index_en.php (accessed 22 May 2010).


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digital connoisseurship. Image processing for the purposes of the identi"#-cation of artists, though far from being solved, is being studied by teams of mathematicians and art experts with the aim of capturing the stylistic signature of an artist, analysing patterns and computable characteristics of the brush strokes, the drawing lines, or colour palette.!? As far as the crucial problem of reproduction is concerned, there is a reciprocal rela-tion between such research and the discipline of art history, given that the history of artworks in reproduction itself constitutes a chapter within the history of art.

New media have also highlighted the problem of the nature of the image; forerunners of electronic and digital images have been recognized in the movements of twentieth-century avant-garde art. The investiga-tions by exponents of Pointillism, Cubism, Futurism, Abstract Art or Surrealism into light, sound, movement, durée, assemblage, etc. have all been analysed in the light of subsequent developments in technological images.%B The interactive installation Khronos Projector, by the scien-tist and artist Alvaro Cassinelli may serve as an illustration of the latter. De"#ned by the author as ‘a video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen’, the Khronos Projector allows users to explore a mass of pre-recorded movies, touching a canvas screen.%! When exploring faces, for instance, they assume, without solution of continuity, a number of poses that can be compared with Cubist portraits, or with Francis Bacon’s distorted faces, or with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or with Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, thus carrying out the intuitions of avant-garde artists and theo-rists on a brand-new support and with a new syntax. Contemporary art-ists, too, working with computers, have often provided art historians with new perspectives, short-circuiting tradition and new languages, as in the case of the multimedia manipulation of Leonardo’s Last Supper, real-ized in 2008 by the "#lmmaker Peter Greenaway, which would have been impossible without contemporary cutting-edge digital technologies.%% As

!?&For example, see: http://digitalpaintinganalysis.org/workshop/index.htm, focused on Van Gogh paintings (accessed 22 May 2010).

%B&Mario Costa, L’estetica dei media: Avanguardie e tecnologia (Rome, 1999); Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art (New York, 1999); Silvia Bordini, Arte elettronica (Florence, 2004).

%!&Presented at the Ars Electronica Festival 2006; technical and theoretical informa-tion, and videos of the interaction examples can be found at the web site: http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/Khronos/ (accessed 22 May 2010).

%%&Peter Greenaway, http://www.petergreenaway.info/ (accessed 22 May 2010).


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early as 1999, however, the designer Yugo Nakamura, an expert in digital and networked environments, invented innovative interactive interface systems that were both contemporary artworks and a ‘remediation’ of artistic heritage.%1 For example, his astonishing Nervous Matrix on Mona Lisa allows remote users to manipulate the proportions of Leonardo’s icon by typing on their computer’s keyboard.%2

Networking and Databases

Following Erwin Panofsky’s analysis of perspective as a symbolic form of western culture, Russian-American computer researcher Lev Manovich has proposed a de"#nition of the database as ‘a new symbolic form of a computer age’ that provides ‘a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world’.%3 This statement is indeed justi"#ed and con"#rmed by the rapid development in recent years of database forms, together with the elaboration of information-retrieval systems, re"#ned search engines, metadata standards, controlled vocabulary tools and user-friendly interfaces.%4

In addition to the national OPAC (On-line Public Access Catalogue) and MetaOPAC, that are the backbones of research in library catalogues, following paths opened up in the pre-computer era by the Iconclass classi"#cation system (now integrated into many museum and archive databases), and by the Getty Institute Research Program (pioneer in the elaboration of art-historical thesauri), many authoritative databases have been created and implemented, o$fering not only catalogue information, but also complete downloadable texts and scalable images.%= Growing on the basis of the digitization of existing document collections in libraries or museums, or assembling scattered ones for monographic or relational purposes, many specialist databases, managed by networks of academic partners, o$fer integrated access to online art history resources and allow accurate end-user searches.

%1&See http://www.yugop.com. On the concept of remediation in new media culture, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cam-bridge, MA, 1999).

%2&The Nervous Matrix on Mona Lisa is accessible at http://yugop.com/ver2/works/typospace3.html (accessed 22 May 2010).

%3&Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2001).%4&Murtha Baca and William Tronzo, ‘Art History and the Digital World’, Art Journal

65.4 (2006) 51–5.%=&Iconclass is available online at, http://www.iconclass.nl (accessed 22 May 2010).


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Antique and Renaissance sources, corpora of rare artworks and docu-ments, private photographic archives: it would be impossible to list all the collections at our disposal. Some of the most relevant and representative of these categories are The Census of Antique Works of Art Known to the Renaissance, supported by a number of partners including the Getty, the Warburg Institute, the Hertziana Library in Rome and the Humboldt Uni-versity in Berlin;%> Pisa Scuola Normale Superiore’s Bivio and Monumenta Rariora;%? the Marburg Photoarchive (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Philipps-Universität);1B the Warburg Institute collections on the survival of the Classics;1! the French database Joconde allowing research into national holdings;1% and the Federico Zeri Foundation in Bologna, which has digi-tized the art and photographic library of the famous Italian scholar (1921–1998), who himself was a sort of living image database.11

The National Library websites of most countries, as well as those of many Ministries of Culture and/or Education, and of many university art history departments, usually o$fer updated lists of links to digital resources by area, discipline, subject. A good starting point for art- historical research is still the Artcyclopedia, an index of art images classi"#ed by artist, museum and subject.12 Other data collections can be consulted subject to registra-tion (and at often high cost) such as the ARTstor Digital Library, initiated by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, its name derived from JSTOR, the digital archive of hundreds of academic journals, many of them on art his-tory and cognate disciplines.13 The latter kinds of resource raise complex issues of ownership, although the results are not always to the disadvan-tage of users. An interesting example of mediation between the interests of copyright owners and the end-users is o$fered by the private Bridgeman image archive.14 The Bridgeman Art Library is also the coordinating part-ner of the European Community funded Project MILE (Metadata Image Library Exploitation) to improve accessibility and trade of digital images throughout Europe.

%>&http://www.census.de (accessed 22 May 2010).%?&http://bivio.signum.sns.it/; http://mora.sns.it (accessed 15 September 2010).1B&http://www.fotomarburg.de (accessed 22 May 2010).1!&http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/ (accessed 22 May 2010).1%&http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm (accessed 22 May

2010).11&http://www.fondazionezeri.unibo.it (accessed 22 May 2010).12&http://www.artcyclopedia.com (accessed 22 May 2010).13&http://www.artstor.org (accessed 22 May 2010).14&http://www.bridgeman.co.uk (accessed 22 May 2010).


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One notable current trend in this "#eld is the mutual linking and the creation of meta-dabases, as in the case of the German Prometheus, an online meta-database of existing picture collections on the Internet.1= As this is happening in other branches of computing and the humanities, the reciprocal connections and the mutual implementation of resources are very signi"#cant in the perspective of building digital data repositories as reliable knowledge hubs.

Digital Media and Teaching

In the relatively short history of the convergence between new media and art history, one of the most relevant formats has been the CD-ROM. In the mid-1990s many excellent art-historical CD-ROMs were published by French electronic publishers in collaboration with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Since the appearance of works as Le Louvre (1994) or Moi, Cézanne (1995), digital media have proved more than able to compete with traditional forms of art-historical publishing, especially with regard to the possibility of new features.1> Zoomable images and hypertextual choices were o$fered on a high scholarly level together with narrative innovations. The concept of ‘edutainment’ (education + entertainment) emerged in this context—although not always used in a positive sense—by the experience of transferring art history to interactive formats, invent-ing new forms of exercises, challenge, feedback and veri"#cation devices.1? The era of the CD-ROM did not last long, for it was soon overtaken by the web, but the novelties introduced by those products, can still be found on many sites, DVDs, totem and interactive museum guides. Moreover, many art-historical publications in hard copy have adopted some of its formats (with the inclusion of text boxes, annotated images, or internal links) and it has had a major impact on the way the history of art has come to be presented and taught, in the classroom, on screen or on paper.

At the boundary of new media, networking, databases and electronic learning, relevant and valuable experience can be gained from a proj-ect such as Victorianweb by George Landow, a pioneer in the applica-tion of computing to literature and the history of art, and the author of

1=&http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de (accessed 22 May 2010).1>&Le Louvre, CD-ROM, Montparnasse Multimedia, Réunion des Musées Nationaux,

1994; Moi, Cézanne, CD-ROM, Index+, Réunion des Musés Nationaux, 1995. 1?&Valerio Eletti, Manuale di editoria multimediale (Rome and Bari, 2003).


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the fundamental work Hypertext (1992), (followed, in 1997 and 2006, by Hypertext 2.0 and Hypertext 3.0).2B Victorianweb is a notable collection of resources devoted to Victorian culture and society, with both a clear and rich hypertextual structure, continuously enriched thanks to contribu-tions from scholars and students worldwide. In this context one might also mention The Rossetti Archive project focused on one artist—Dante Gabriel Rossetti—who left a corpus both of texts and paintings with mul-tifaceted internal links.2! In addition, The Rossetti Archive participates in the development of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), an aggregation of peer-reviewed schol-arly studies, based on open source software, under a Creative Commons License. At present many art-historical journals follow the scienti"#c model of peer-reviewing electronic publications, exploiting the potentialities of the collaborative approach of digital media.2%

In 2004, the web search engine company Google launched Google Print, now Google Books, a tool that searches the full texts of thousands of scanned books, and Google Scholar, which provides a repository of schol-arly information. It is worth noting that the rich world of newsletters and forums, besides wikisystems, provide important ongoing experiences in the perspective of a dynamic publishing and learning digital environment.21 As far as teaching and learning are concerned, at present, many art data-bases o$fer substantial learning resources, thematic timelines, and expert guidance. The purpose is to support e-learning with proper means and resources; this involves not only transferring traditional slides into digital images, but also building e$fective learning-objects, scalable and collect-able according to speci"#c technological platforms, international metadata standards and di$ferent user categories. In this context a note is in order regarding the fact that some important museums have implemented learn-on line services, based on interaction with the users.22

2B&Victorian Web is available at: http://www.victorianweb.org (accessed 22 May 2010). See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD, 1992).

2!&http://www.rossettiarchive.org (accessed 22 May 2010).2%&Hilary Ballon and MariCt Westermann, Art History and its Publications in the Elec-

tronic Age: Report on a Study Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2006), http://cnx.org/content/col10376/latest/ (accessed 22 May 2010).

21&See for example, http://wikiartpedia.org (accessed 22 May 2010).22&See Tate’s website: http://www.tate.org.uk/learnonline/ (accessed 19 April 2011).


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Museums and Exhibitions

The impact of digital technologies on museums and exhibitions is increas-ingly important and varied. It includes: single museum websites; museum portals and networks; two- and three-dimensional reconstructions of existing museums and collections both o$@Aine and on the web; two- and three-dimension reconstructions of immaterial, scattered, and non- existent collections; in situ digital interactive devices to explore museum holdings; museum guides available on palm, e-book, mobile phone, and radiofrequency devices, with special attention to the disabled.

The approach here is no di$ferent from that of digital artwork reproduc-tions or publications. One can observe a linear transfer of information from real-world to computer-based environments (visible in the many websites of museums o$fering remote information) or a deep transfor-mation of digital objects according to the features and potentialities of the new media (evident in the less frequent, but much more satisfying websites of museums o$fering a complex approach to their holdings, with multiple services and an information net).

After the "#rst experiments and early approaches, in the 1990s the rela-tionship between computing and museums matured and consolidated. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) began organizing directo-ries of online museums and published the Virtual Library Museum Pages in order to monitor and collect the very di$ferent experiments under way.23 The term ‘virtual museum’, a corollary of the pervading concept of the ‘virtual’, became widespread in art-historical discussions and conferences, and was accompanied by the announcement of numerous international competitions for the realization of virtual museums.24

In 1991, the media artist Je$frey Shaw interpreted the virtual museum as an artwork, realizing a tautological computer graphic installation where the explorer navigates in a virtual space that has the same appearance as the real one.2= Since then the range of interpretations and proposals has

23&http://icom.museum (accessed 22 May 2010).24&On the virtual museum see Bernard Deloche, Le musée virtuel (Paris, 2001). On the

question of the virtual see Pierre Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel? (Paris, 1995); Archimuse (Archives & Museum Informatics, http://www.archimuse.com, accessed 15 Sepember 2010) is a rich resource for all aspects of museum informatics, as is the International Cultural Heritage Information Meetings/International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM), founded in 1991.

2=&www.je$frey-shaw.net/ (accessed 22 May 2010).


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proven to be extremely wide, involving the most recent computer applica-tions, such as tagged artworks emitting information captured by museum visitors. New possibilities abound; as Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museo Galileo in Florence, has pointed out, ‘In the digital domain there are no buildings or walls, and we are not obliged to reproduce distinctions based on the typologies of material objects or on the various nature of their physical shells.’2> Digital museums must not be understood as clones of real ones, but as the protagonists of a new form of shared knowledge, as meta-repositories of cultural heritage used by a web community formed by subjects who, thanks to the development of new technologies such as the semantic web, can be at the same time both users and providers, clients and servers. The recent Google Art Project allows access to high de"#nition artwork reproductions and exploration of the museums where they are located.2?

Conclusion

Art history is necessarily a$fected by such changing perspectives and trends, even if it is too early to de"#ne with con"#dence the nature and the directions of these changes. Among the main innovations are the extremely easy and quick supply of images and information, the potency of the search engines, new ways of co-operation between art historians, computer experts and web designers, and scholars’ connected networks. A brainframe a$fected by digital items can be recognized in the di$fusion of conceptual maps and relational databases, albums and inventories, as products of speci"#c research projects which would be impossible to transfer completely to paper. The sensibility toward @Auid, immaterial, changeable and recombinable versions of art-historical studies renders digital media particularly useful for building both individual and collec-tive palimpsests.

In this regard it is of no small signi"#cance that engagement with digital media has led to a reconsideration of some aspects of the research of the German scholar Aby Warburg (1866–1929), with regard to concepts such as association, hyperlink, rhizomatic structure, and nonlinear recombina-tion of elements. At the 30th International Congress of the History of Art

2>&www.imss."#.it/mesmuses/galluzzi.html (accessed 22 May 2010).2?&http://www.googleartproject.com/ (accessed 10 February 2011).


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(2000) the name of Aby Warburg recurred in discussions concerning the impact of the web on iconographic classi"#cation.3B

Both his writings, full of @Aow-chart-like textual synopses, and his e$forts to "#nd original ways of communicating the multidisciplinary core of his studies, not least his Mnemosyne Atlas, have suggested analogies with these concepts. António Guerreiro extravagantly claimed that the Ham-burg scholar ‘can be considered a forerunner of the hypertext’ and, as Michaela Glasho$f and others have evocatively stated, his work provides for an art history situated ‘between the Talmud and the Internet’.3! The richness of Warburg’s heritage o$fered material for Marion Müller’s PIAV (Politisch-Ikonographisches Archiv der Vision/Visual Archive of Political Iconography), a visual database of political images, intended as a visual library for thematic search and analysis.3%

Following Warburg’s lead, groups of researchers have been working on electronic versions of his Mnemosyne Atlas and on designing platforms for interdisciplinary research inspired by his complex experiments with words and images.31 Even the particular form of cataloguing taken by his research library in Hamburg (now the Warburg Institute in London), keeping to the rule of ‘good neighbourliness’ amongst books, has been seen as a forerunner of present e$forts at creating information storage and retrieval systems based on semantic association, rather than on index-ing. Users can not only "#nd the books they are looking for but also, more signi"#cantly, the documents they need for their research, according to associations rooted in the interconnected levels of human culture, which emerge by dint of the properties of the system itself. This also raises the

3B&Ross Woodrow, ‘Iconography and the Internet: Warburg’s fantasy becomes reality’ (paper presented at the Thirtieth International Congress of the History of Art, London, September 3–8, 2000).

3!&António Guerreiro, ‘Enciclopédia e Hipertexto: A Biblioteca Warburg. Entre o Labir-into e o Hipertexto’, http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/hyper/warb-labirinto.htm (accessed 22 May 2010). The phrase was coined by Michaela Glasho$f, Andrea Neumann and Martin Deppner in Aby M. Warburgs Bilderatlas zwischen Talmud und Netzwerk, the title of the 1987 INSEA Congress, Hamburg, quoted by Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002) 483. Warburg’s atlas, which remained incomplete at his death, has subsequently been published: Mar-tin Warnke and Claudia Brink, eds., Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Berlin, 1999, 2nd revised edn. 2003).

3%&Jacobs University, Bremen31&See La Rivista di Engramma on line (www.engramma.it, abstracts in English and

Latin), WEL ‘The Warburg Electronic Library’, http://www.welib.de/e-entry.htm, and the Warburg Haus Hamburg (http://www.warburg-haus.de, accessed 22 May 2010).


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question of the role of serendipity. Helped on by present research tools, the latter should not be undervalued; unexpected information, emerg-ing as an objet trouvé from the complexity and the fullness of the sys-tem, can be considered a central feature of contemporary, networked, art history.


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