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Our world is changing rapidly under the influence of human behaviour: climate change and biodiversity loss but also pandemics are just some of the most dramatic manifestations of global crises of unprecedented scope. As trusted sources of information and sites of transformative engagement, museums can and must play a role in addressing the most pressing issues of our times. How can museums respond to those crises, what new roles could our institutions play to strengthen the communities they serve? What is the role of our collections and how can they be protected from the dangers of global changes or local disasters? How should museums reinvent themselves in the face of a planetary emergency?

The exhibition The F*word – Guerrilla Girls and Feminist Graphic Design draws attention to the stark underrepresentation of female designers in the Graphics and Poster Collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Of all the works in the collection, only 1.5% were created by women. This publication brings together texts and installation views from the exhibition, providing insights into the root causes and status quo and documenting the first steps towards greater diversity through new acquisition strategies and exhibition practices.

The catalogue is published in German and English.

The exhibition The F*word – Guerrilla Girls and Feminist Graphic Design draws attention to the stark underrepresentation of female designers in the Graphics and Poster Collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Of all the works in the collection, only 1.5% were created by women. This publication brings together texts and installation views from the exhibition, providing insights into the root causes and status quo and documenting the first steps towards greater diversity through new acquisition strategies and exhibition practices.

The catalogue is published in German and English.

with the assistance of Thomas Hofmeier

With remarkable industry the publishers Johann Theodor de Bry and Lucas Jennis brought forth a great variety of printed books on practical and spiritual alchemy between 1615 and 1630. The emerging artist Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593–1650) was commissioned to illustrate nearly 20 of those publications. In close collaboration with publishers, authors and fellow artists, Merian managed to develop sophisticated, aesthetically appealing and iconic images without having had specific iconographic templates at hand. In this anthology, 16 international authors subject the famous corpus of the Frankfurt Alchemica illustrata to a comprehensive art and cultural-historical analysis.

Belgian Symbolism has been rediscovered in recent decades. While artists such as Léon Spilliaert and George Minne were long an insiders’ tip, they now captivate a broad audience. Still, many works of this art movement are considered as attractive as they are difficult to access due to the sophisticated formal language, hidden meanings, and mystical visions that characterize them. The ˈMuseum Coffersˈ open up the possibility of discovering and understanding them in their cultural and art historical context. This is impressively demonstrated by the museum coffers presented here: they turn cultural learning into a holistic experience and open doors to new worlds.

Contemporary art can often hardly be distinguished from advertising - it is superficial and affirmative of the capitalist presentation of goods. The 9th Berlin Biennale 2016, "The Present in Drag", curated by the New York collective DIS, was confronted with this accusation. This book examines how post-internet art behaves in the exhibition space. The post-digital displays by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Timur Si-Qin and Débora Delmar take center stage. The author claims that the quality of these works lies in their lack of distance from economic circulation systems, in the strategies of branding and in the reference to their spaces and surfaces.

The Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena (can. 1450) is one of the most important saints of the 15^th century. His funerary monument in S. Bernardino, L'Aquila, is extraordinary in formal terms and at the same time an example of new visual strategies in saints’ cults at the beginning of the early modern period. in 1505 the free-standing and richly decorated mausoleum was designed by the Aquilano sculptor Silvestro di Giacomo. Its large openings give insight into the vaulted interior and the undivided saint’s body. This study analyses Bernardino's sepulchre and burial church comprehensively regarding their typological, devotional, civic and urbanistic significance.

The publication of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e. V. focuses on past debates, current developments and future perspectives of the research field. The contributions highlight specific seizure processes related to colonial contexts, the Nazi looting of cultural property or expropriations in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR that are significant for the respective subject. Not least based on the history of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung and its more than twenty years of activity, aspects of the historical and current handling of looted and stolen property are illuminated and critically examined in relation to the conflicting demands of cultural policy, the group's own scholarly aspirations, and the actual working practices of the researchers.

This conference volume examines the evidence, religious experiences and aesthetic transformations of sacred space in the Age of Enlightenment from an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective. To what extent should we understand the church in the 18th century not only as a sacred space, but also as a place that attracts believers and tourists, clergy and artists, nobles and citizens, men and women alike, and at the same time has a social, aesthetic and emotional dimension? How can we explain the fundamental secularisation and the dissolution of boundaries that affected the sacred space between the death of Louis XIV and the French Revolution? How is the question of the credibility of transcendence dealt with in the age of the emerging natural sciences, encyclopaedias and the progress of knowledge in art? Against the background of the confrontation between criticism of the church and absolutism, atheism, demystification of the religious and plausible reactualisation of the spiritual, (syn)aesthetic concepts of sacred spaces are of particular relevance. Not only integrated into art-theoretical discourses, they are a tangible expression of the continuous readjustment of Enlightenment society.

Scholarly editions contextualize our cultural heritage. Traditionally, methodologies from the field of scholarly editing are applied to works of literature, e.g. in order to trace their genesis or present their varied history of transmission. What do we make of the variance in other types of cultural heritage? How can we describe, record, and reproduce it systematically? From medieval to modern times, from image to audiovisual media, the book traces discourses across different disciplines in order to develop a conceptual model for scholarly editions on a broader scale. By doing so, it also delves into the theory and philosophy of the (digital) humanities as such.

The touring exhibition "The Swiss Poster" circulated through Europe and America between 1949 and 1952. As a cultural diplomatic manifestation, Pro Helvetia's poster exhibition fulfilled a strategic function by conveying national values through design at a time when the political world order was being reshaped. Simultaneously, the exhibition made a significant contribution toward stylizing and establishing the now UNESCO-recognized label of Swiss graphic design, which had previously been ignored in the historiography of the discipline.

For Jakob Burckhardt, "the question: to what extent portrait? to what extent ideal? [...] was one of the most graceful questions in Italian art history". It is indeed not only a central problem of Italian, but of the entire European history of portraiture and its research. Especially with regard to portraits of rulers, the aspect of physiognomic resemblance was marginalized again and again, despite its crucial significance to the concept and subject of the portrait, and the "individual" took a back seat to "type," "ideal," and "higher conception". The present study counters this with an interpretive model based on the concept of similitudo, which conceives the post-ancient 'rediscovery' of similarity as an effective and significant factor in political semiotics.

This volume compiles the contributions at the International Conference of the same name, which was held at Leibniz University Hanover in June 2021. The conference was planned by the collaborative project "Provenance Research on Non-European Collections and Ethnology in Lower Saxony" (PAESE), coordinated at the State Museum Hanover. The aim was to bring together actors from different perspectives to discuss questions, methods and (preliminary) results in the field of provenance research on collections from colonial contexts.

The joining of individual images or the mounting of papers to form larger sheets can be understood as material responses to the challenges of representing topographies. The combination of topographic images in composite media – albums, travelogues, atlases or picture series coupled with maps – enables complex representations as well as contextualised perceptions of space. This volume brings together case studies in which techniques of gluing and pasting prove essential for the rendering of space in visual media.

Technologische Kartierungen und Umzeichnungen von Josefine Kramer

Since 2013, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg has been researching its extensive collection of late medieval panel paintings in an exemplary manner. Between 2019 and 2022, the 26 panels from Bavaria (Altbayern), Austria and South Tyrol were the focus of an exclusively art-technologically oriented research project at the Institut für Kunsttechnik und Konservierung as part of the BMBF-funded programme "Rare Disciplines – Great Potencials". The publication, which marks the conclusion of the research project "Materiality in Context", offers a summary of selected results of the project, embedded in the context of current research. The richly illustrated publication is published open access in both PDF and HTML format, thus opening up new avenues in terms of image quality and content networking.

„The Early Shows" traces Banksy's early artistic development from tagger and music graphic designer to stencil street artist. The now-prominent Banksy rose to worldwide fame around 2006. After that, he created his works before the eyes of the world. Rather obscure are still is exhibitions before 2003, when he had his UK breakthrough with the self-organized retrospective Turf War and his album cover design for BritPop band Blur. This survey, edited by Banksy expert Ulrich Blanché, covers early Banksy shows and events 1992 until 2005. It aims to be an academic counterpart to Banksy’s artist book Wall and Piece (2005), which focused mainly on his illegal street works until then.

This book is a pleading for the intensive contemplation of paintings. With the analyses presented here, we dive into the immensely multifaceted pictorial world of Caravaggio's work.
An adventure that is also a particularly tempting venture because it is a matter of becoming completely involved in one's own aesthetic experience. That means, it is only in the concrete visual perception that we encounter the inner meaning of the intrinsically significant pictorial phenomena in the works. In other words: "We see the value" of painting, as Art historian Theodor Hetzer once euphorically and pathetically formulated, "in the magic of its possibilities".
Readers are invited on a special phenomenological journey through magnificent pictorial landscapes of the early modern period. The focus of interest here is Caravaggio's pictorial solution in connection with the beheading of John the Babtist.

Despite his influence on Siena's art scene, Sodoma is one of the most neglected Renaissance painters. Research on him mainly focused on his frescoes. This study is an in-depth analysis of his panel and canvas paintings considering his artistic development, handling of influences and working methods. In additon, it provides answers to questions about the genesis of specific art works and a comprehensive catalog raisonné of Sodoma's panel and canvas paintings with accompanying drawings. This publication thus paves the way for further studies on Sodoma and brings him back into the art historical discourse.

With the spread of book printing in Europe from the mid-15th century, precious miniature artifacts emerged, designed in the form of books. They were only a few centimeters in size and featured book spines, page edges, and closures. However, they were typically not reductions of 'real books.' Instead of printed or written parchment pages, these pendants often contained illustrated metal sheets inside or served as containers for relics.
These representative jewelry pieces served their wearers as status symbols, expressed their humanistic beliefs and erudition, but could also make a religious statement. At the same time, they often served as a means of individual devotion and reaffirmation of faith or promised protection as powerful amulets.
In her study, Romina Ebenhöch presents a catalog of this unique genre of jewelry pendants for the first time and analyzes the function of these objects.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the outer walls of numerous palaces, churches and public buildings in Florence were decorated in sgraffito, a design based on the scratching of motifs into the plaster surface. Among the most prominent examples are the courtyards of the Medici Palace and the Palazzo della Signoria. The study examines the history of the technology and the practical execution, considers the status as an (architectural) image and gives an overview of the use of sgraffito in other Italian cities. The detailed catalogue includes 34 Florentine buildings with sgraffito decorations executed in the Tre- and Quattrocento.

In the spring of 1732 Filippo Juvarra sent from Rome an album with 41 Disegni di Prospettiva Ideale meant for August the Strong, prince-elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Bearer of the gift was Antonio Giuseppe Gabaleone Count of Wackerbarth Salmour – the Turin nobleman naturalized in Saxony – who at that time was in the papal city on a secret mission on the king’s behalf.
The album preserved in the Kupferstich-Kabinett of Dresden celebrates the exemplarity of Rome over the centuries. Through its themes, its staged compositions, and its graphic technique, an evocative narration unfolds – a further confirmation of Juvarra's multifaceted qualities as a great director of the arts.
The drawings are here analyzed as a whole for the first time, together with some unpublished letters that help shed light on an artistic exchange involving the courts of Rome, Turin and Dresden.

From the 19th century, loan exhibitions flourished all over Europe. Local collectors in the bigger cities collaborated in order to present their private art treasures to the public. This exhibition format is a predecessor of today’s museum practise and it contributed to the development of new curatorial strategies. This study examines ten Berlin loan exhibitions between 1872 and 1914, that have been curated by museum makers like Wilhelm von Bode, Max J. Friedländer and Ludwig Justi. It focusses on the potential social implications for the lenders as well as the cultural-political intentions of the organisers of these art shows.

Provenance has been in the focus of international museum research and politics for more than a decade. This book analyses acquisition histories of objects in the Berlin Egyptian Museum during the first years of the director Adolf Erman (1854—1937). Therefore, two original documents of the Central Archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin have been analysed and published. This allows the identification of individual provenances as well as their acquisition context. The recording of the various art and antiquities markets, the protagonists, museums and their acquisition strategies illustrate the antiquities trade in the 19^th century in Egypt and Europe.

Nowhere is the ›stripped‹ book as visible as in the library, where the bared spines of books line up in metres upon metres of shelves. The loss of the dust jacket is therefore as salient as it is familiar. Reason enough to trace the supposedly inconspicuous ›life‹ of the dust jacket. But what exactly is ›a dust jacket‹? What makes it special? And how does it relate to the text within? The author draws our attention to selected writings on art and cultural history, whose outsides and insides interact with one another in unsuspecting ways. We will come to see that dust jackets are manifests of the ideas and aesthetics expressed in the covered books.

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the end of the "kipper-and-wipper-period", an era of dramatic monetary devaluation. Three centuries before the German Hyperinflation, massive coin debasement and the destruction of large assets occurred.
The contributions in this volume are devoted to "kipper" coinage in Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Kurtrier and Westphalia, a current recording project of "Kipper coins" and the reception of the "kipper-and-wipper-period" by Wilhelm Hauff and Gustav Freytag.
With essays by Ralf Fischer zu Cramburg, Gabriel Heeren and Konrad Schneider, Torsten Fried, Rainer Grund and Christian Klose, Paul Höffgen, Stefan Kötz, Joachim Krüger, Wolfgang Leschhorn, Matthias Ohm and Julius Roch.