Institut für Kunstgeschichte

The Interior

Research Topics

  • The Arts, Natural Sciences, and Trade in Early Modern Europe
  • Art and Visual Culture of the Spanish Netherlands
  • Visual Arts in Rome, Genoa, and Naples
  • Visual Arts of the Jesuit Order
  • Peter Paul Rubens
  • Early Netherlandish Painting
  • History and Theory of Early Modern Collecting
  • Theory and Historiography of Artistic Media, Materials, and Techniques

Research Projects

Ongoing Funded Research Projects

2016–2019 SNF, Abt. Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften: Project: “Materialized Identities: Objects, Affects and Effects in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1750”: Susanna Burghartz (U Basel), Christine Göttler (U Bern), Lucas Burkart (U Basel), Ulinka Rublack (St John’s College, U Cambridge). Project Christine Göttler: “Mutable Matter: Netherlandish Painters on Values, Uses, and Effects of Gold”.
2016–2017 Research platform, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern: “Original – Kopie: Techniken und Ästhetiken der Reproduzierbarkeit” (with Anselm Gerhard, Gabriele Rippl, Peter J. Schneemann, and Michael Stolz)

Completed Funded Research Projects

2012–2015 SNF, Abt. CoRE: Project Sinergia: “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)” : Christine Göttler (principal investigator), Brigitt Borkopp-Restle, Norberto Gramaccini, Bernd Nicolai, Peter Johannes Schneemann (alle Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern); Peter W. Marx, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Universität Bern)
2015–2016 SNF, Abt. CoRE: Project Sinergia: “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)”: Christine Göttler (principal investigator), Brigitt Borkopp-Restle, Bernd Nicolai (alle Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern); Peter W. Marx, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Universität Bern)
2012–2016 SNF, Abt. Personenförderung:
2012–2014 Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO): Grant to organize three work-in-progress workshops in Groningen, Bern, and London, as preparation of a volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art on Trading Values: Cultural Translation in Early Modern Antwerp (principal investigator: Bart Ramkers, University of Groningen; further investigators: Christine Göttler, Universität Bern, Joanna Woodall, Courtauld Institute, London).
2010–2014 Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant for research project “Art, Natural Science, Local History, and the New World in Counter-Reformation Antwerp: The Collection of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Manuel Ximenes (1564-1632)”. The project is conducted in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Prof. Dr. Sven Dupré).

Activities

List of all Activities (08/2016) (PDF, 189KB)

 

Workshops and Conferences Organized

2016 Original – Kopie: Techniken und Ästhetiken der Reproduzierbarkeit, co-organized with Gabriele Rippl, Peter J. Schneemann, and Michael Stolz, University of Bern, December 15. Speakers: Ludwig Jäger (University of Cologne); Cyrill P. Rigamonti (University of Bern); Wolfgang Brückle (University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne); Frank Fehrenbach (University of Hamburg); Mariusz Nowacki (University of Bern); Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University).
2016 The Nomadic Object: Early Modern Religious Art in Global Contact
Organizers: Mia M. Mochizuki and Christine Göttler
Abu Dhabi, January 18–20
2015 Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Organizers: Christine Göttler and Karl Enenkel
Bern, December 9–11

Conference Sessions Organized

2018 HNA Conference Ghent, May 24-26. Session “Transmediality in Global Netherlandish Art”, co-organized with Dawn Odell and Thijs Weststeijn.
2016 Third Swiss Congress for Art History, Basel, June 23-25. Session “KunstStoff: Künstlerische Konzepte der Transmutation”, co-organized with Peter J. Schneemann (speakers: Maurice Saß, George Steinmann, Nathalie Bäschlin, Nicolas Galley, Ann-Sophie Lehmann).

Summer School at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern

2016 Summer School “Border Regimes: Confrontations, Configurations, Transpositions”, Kandersteg, September 4–9: Keynote speakers: Mary C. Fuller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Monica Juneja, Universität Heidelberg (Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context); Sandro Mezzadra, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Università die Bologna; Bernhard Siegert, Gerd-Bucerius-Professor für Geschichte und Theorie der Kulturtechniken, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar).

Papers at International Conferences

2017 CAA. 105th Annual Conference, New York, NY, February 15-18. Session “Salt, Silver, Shell, Stone: Nature and Artifact in Early Modern Europe”, chaired by Christopher Heuer, Williams College: “Fertile Waters: Salt and Saltcellars in Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp”
2016 Berlin, Ibero amerikanisches Institut, December 1-2. Epistemologías transculturales. La producción de conocimientos en zonas de contacto en América Latina, organized by Astrid Windus: “Reading the Inventory: The Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564-1632) in Antwerp” (with Sven Dupré)
2016 Research Project Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World (1450-1800), University of Antwerp, November 18-19. International Conference The Materialities of Knowledge in Early Modern Cities, organized by Bert De Munck: “Mount Potosí in Antwerp: The Imagery of Labor and Wealth in Rubens’s Arch of the Mint (1635)”
2016

Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge. Epistemic Images in Early Modern Germany and its Neighbours, organized by Alexander Marr, Horst Bredekamp, Christopher Heuer, and Pablo Schneider: “Epistemic and Enigmatic Imagery in the Work of Hendrick Goltzius”
2016 CIHA. 34th World Congress of Art History, Beijing, September 16-20. Session “Self-Awareness and Self-Affirmation”, organized by Alessandro Nova, Hana Gründler, Yu Hui, and Liu Chen: “Artists in Groups: Articulating Collective Identities in Seventeenth-Century Haarlem”
2016 The Renaissance Society of America, The Sixty-second Annual Meeting, Boston, March 31-April 2. Session “The Promises of Gold: Materialized Desires and Social Phantasms in Economy, Art, and Science II”, organized by Tina Asmussen and Michael Jucker: “Antwerp and the Emperor’s Indies: Rubens’s Arch of the Mint for Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand (1635)”

Invited Lectures

2016 “Kunst der Diätetik / Diätetik der Kunst um 1600” Lecture series In aller Munde: Essen und Ernährung, organized by Collegium generale, Universität Bern, March 2

Publications

List of all publications (08/2016) (PDF, 187KB)

 

Monographs

2010 Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform, PROTEUS: Studies in Identity Formation in Early Modern Image-Text-Ritual-Habitat, vol. 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). [436 pp.]
1996 Die Kunst des Fegefeuers nach der Reformation. Kirchliche Schenkungen, Ablass und Almosen in Antwerpen und Bologna um 1600, Berliner Schriften zur Kunst, vol. 7 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996). [387 pp.]

Monographs in Preparation

2018 Hendrick Goltzius’ Allegory of the (Alchemical) Arts in the Kunstmuseum Basel
2017 The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez in early seventeenth-century Antwerp (with Sven Dupré), Cultural Histories of the Material World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in preparation).

Co-Edited Books

2017 Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, ed. Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, Visual Culture in Early Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2017).
2016 Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650, ed. Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart and Christine Göttler, Intersections, vol. 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). [Expected in September]
2014 Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 64 (2014), ed. Christine Göttler, Bart Ramakers, Joanna Woodall (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
2013 Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, Intersections, vol. 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
2007 Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber, Intersections, vol. 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) [concept, preface and contribution by Christine Göttler]

Co-Edited Books in Preparation

(2017) Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Göttler and Karl A. Enenkel, Intersections, vol. XXX (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
(2017) The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki, Intersections, vol. XXX (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
(2016) Reading Room, ed. Birgitt Borkopp-Restle, Christine Göttler, Norberto Gramaccini, Peter W. Marx, Bernd Nicolai, Tabea Schindler, Peter J. Schneemann (proposal accepted by Hatje Cantz).

Articles and Book Chapters

(2018) “Imagination in the Chamber of Sleep: On a Pen-and-Ink-Drawing by Karel van Mander,”  in Image, Imagination and Cognition, ed. Paul Bakker, Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, and Claus Zittel, Intersections, vol. XXX (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2018; accepted).
(2017) “Showing by Hiding: Hendrick Goltzius’s Allegory of the (Alchemical) Arts in the Kunstmuseum Basel, in Congress Proceedings; 34th Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Bejing 2016 (accepted).
(2017) “The Art of Solitude: Environments of Prayer at the Bavarian Court,“ in Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bridget Heal and Joseph Koerner, Art History 40.2 (Special Issue, forthcoming April 2017), pp. 1–26
(2017) “Introduction: Hidden Artifices,” with Sven Dupré, in Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, ed. Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, Visual Culture in Early Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–16.
(2017) “Vulcan’s Forge: The Sphere of Art in Early Modern Antwerp,” in Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, ed. Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, Visual Culture in Early Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 52–87.
2016

“‘Indian daggers with idols’ in the early modern constcamer. Collecting, picturing, and imagining ‘exotic’ weaponry in the Netherlands and beyond”, Netherlandish Art in its Global Context, ed. Eric Jorink, Frits Scholten, and Thijs Weststeijn, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 66 (2016), pp. 78–109.
2016 “Introduction: Sites of Mediation in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: A Working Perspective”, with Susanna Burghartz and Lucas Burkart, in Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Objects, Processes, and Interactions in Europe and Beyond, 1450–1650, ed. Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart and Christine Göttler, Intersections, vol. 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
2016 “Sites of Art, Nature and the Antique in the Spanish Netherlands” (with Tine Meganck), in Embattled Territory: The Circulation of Knowledge in the Spanish Netherlands, ed. Sven Dupré, Bert De Munck, Werner Thomas, and Geert Vanpaemel (Ghent: Academia Press, 2016), pp. 333-369.

Articles and Book Chapters in Preparation

(2017) “The Art of Solitude in post-Tridentine Art,” in Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Göttler and Karl A. Enenkel, Intersections, vol. XXX (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
(2017) “The Idols of Antwerp, circa 1620: Connected Histories in the Early Modern Collection”, in The Global Republic of Sacred Things: The Circulation of Religious Art in the Early Modern World, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki, Intersections, vol. XXX (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Shorter Contributions, Catalogue Essays and Catalogue Entries

2016 “Kunst der Diäthetik – Diäthetik der Kunst”, UniPress 167 (April 2016), pp. 24-26.

Fellowships and Awards

2017 University of Warwick, Institute of Advanced Study, Visiting Fellow, March 6-10
2016 Netherlands Institute for Advanced study in the Humanities and Social sciences, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, Fellow-in-Residence from 1 May 2016 to 30 June 2016. Research group: Knowledge and the City; research project: “Inventing Newness: Entangled Histories of Art in Antwerp, Haarlem, and Amsterdam”
2015 Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, Visiting Scholar, August 2015
2014 Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Scholar, August 2014
2014 Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Getty Scholar, January to June 2014
2013 Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship, 15 June to 15 August 2013
2010 International Research Center for Cultural History, Vienna, Senior Fellowship (four months)

Memberships

Editorial Board

  • Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture
  • Neue Berner Schriften zur Kunst

University Functions and Services

  • Director, Graduate School of the Humanities, Walter Benjamin Kolleg (since 2015)
  • Director, Interdisziplinäres Forschungs- und Nachwuchsnetzwerk, Walter Benjamin Kolleg (since 2015)
  • Evaluationsgremium, SNF Ambizione
  • Evalutationsgremium, SNF Förderungsprofessuren (since 2016)

Scientific Committees

  • Member, Beirat des Weiterbildungslehrgangs Angewandte Kunstwissenschaft, Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft SIK-ISEA, Zürich
  • Member, Corpus Vitrearum Helvetiae, Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (since 2014)
  • Member, Corpus der Barocken Deckenmalerei in Deutschland, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (since 2016)
  • CIHA, National Committee, representative (since 2016)

Memberships in Professional Organizations

  • Arbeitskreis Niederländische Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte
  • Carl Justi-Vereinigung für spanische und portugiesische Kunst
  • College Art Association
  • Historians of Netherlandish Art (board member 2004-2007)
  • Renaissance Society of America
  • Sixteenth Century Studies
  • Verband deutscher Kunsthistoriker
  • Vereinigung der Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker in der Schweiz

CV

Curriculum vitae (10/2017) (PDF, 346KB)

 

Prof. Dr. Christine Göttler is Professor of Art History at the University of Bern. Before joining the University of Bern in 2009, she was Professor of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle (1998–2009). She obtained a PhD in art history from Zurich University and a habilitation, also in art history, from the Freie Universität Berlin and held post-doctoral research and teaching positions at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Warburg Institute in London.

Her main research interests are collecting practices, collection spaces, the interactions between the various arts in early modern Europe—especially the Netherlands—and the visual and spatial imagery of interiority and the imagination. Her most recent books include Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (2010); Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. with W. de Boer, Intersections 26 ( 2013); Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp, ed. with B. Ramakers and J. Woodall, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 64 (2014); and Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts, ed. with S. Dupré (2016). She has published widely on diverse topics ranging from Reformation iconoclasm, post-Tridentine spirituality, and the relationship between art, nature, and the senses to historical aspects of early modern artists’ materials such as wax, copper, and papier-mâché.

Her professional awards include fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Wassenaar), the International Research Centre for Cultural History (Vienna), the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC), the J. Paul Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin). She is currently preparing a monograph on Hendrick Goltzius’s Allegory of the Arts (1611) at the Kunstmuseum Basel and a co-authored book (with S. Dupré) entitled Reading the Inventory: The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632) in Antwerp. She is also working on a book-length study on interiority and interior spaces in post-Tridentine Europe. She is a member of the editorial board of Intersections.