Frank Fehrenbach
Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
Room: 109 (Main Building)
Tel.: +49 40 42838 8131
Fax: +49 40 42838 8145
E-Mail: frank.fehrenbach"AT"uni-hamburg.de
Research project
At the moment I am finishing a book on the category of ‘enlivenment’ in Early Modern art and in its accompanying discourse. It will contain a series of case studies from the 14th through 18th centuries in which art enters into dialogue with physics, anatomy, botany, and economic theory. My thesis is that art and artistic discourse in the Early Modern period develop forms of ambivalence between dead and living, whose puzzling character leaves open the question of what is alive: an experiential space in which the enlivenment of the viewer also comes into play as a motor of artistic animation. Art embraces, at the same time, the claim of the real ensoulment of the object; it plays with the possibility of enlivenment in fiction. The play between life and death sets the stage for a fundamental ambiguity of the animate being itself, debated extensively by contemporary authors from Pico della Mirandola to Leonardo da Vinci to Francis Bacon.
Vita
BA and MA studies in art history, medieval and modern history, and philosophy in Tübingen and Basel. 1992–1995 Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen (work group “Kulturgeschichte der Natur [Cultural history of nature]”). 1995 PhD at the University of Tübingen. 1995–96 Postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome. 1996–2001 Assistant professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence. Visiting professor in the Hermann-von-Helmholtz Center at the Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and at Harvard University. 2003 Habilitation at the University of Basel. 2003–2005 Research Fellow at the Fritz Thyssen-Foundation. 2005 offer from the Otto Friedrich-University in Bamberg (declined). 2005–2013 Senior Professor at Harvard University. 2010–2011 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Prizes and honors: Hans Janssen Prize for European Cultural History at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen (1996); Prize of the Aby Warburg Foundation in Hamburg (2004); Humboldt Professorship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2013). Leadership of the research group “Naturbilder/Images of Nature” in the Institute of Art History at the University of Hamburg.
Relevant publications
„Tra vivo e spento“. Marinos lebendige Bilder, in: Christiane Kruse – Rainer Stillers (eds.), Barocke Bildkulturen: Dialog der Künste in Giovanni Battista Marinos ,Galeria‘, Wiesbaden 2013, 203–222.
Homo nudus vivus. Zur Anathomia (1345)des Guido da Vigevano, in: M. De Giorgi et al. (eds.), Synergies in Visual Culture/Bildkulturen im Dialog, Munich 2013, 301–314.
Coming Alive. Some Remarks on the Rise of „Monochrome“ Sculpture in the Renaissance, in: Susanne Ebbinghaus (eds.), Color and Sculpture; special issue of Source XXX/3, 2011, 47–55.
„Du lebst und thust mir nichts.“ Aby Warburg und die Lebendigkeit der Kunst, in: Hartmut Böhme/Johannes Endres (eds.), Der Code der Leidenschaften. Fetischismus in den Künsten, Munich 2010, 124–145.
Colpi vitali. Berninis Beseelungen, in: N. Suthor/E. Fischer-Lichte (eds.), Verklärte Körper. Ästhetiken der Transfiguration, Munchen 2006, 91–144
Calor nativus – Color vitale. Prolegomena zu einer Ästhetik des ,Lebendigen‘ in der frühen Neuzeit, in: U. Pfisterer/Max Seidel (eds.), Visuelle Topoi. Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance, Berlin – Munich, 2003, 151–170.