Artistic Innovations and Cultural Zones

The essays explore the artistic interactions between northern and southern European artists of the 15th and 16th century and allow for a fresh view of the works by such masters like da Vinci, van der Weyden and Dürer. Besides the book presents historical overviews of the complexities of artistic dialog between Italy and Northern Europe of the time.

In 1992, the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) held its 28th Congress in re-unified Berlin under the theme Künstlerischer Austausch – Artistic Exchange. The subject fed a strain of idealism and optimism relating the history of art to the life of our times. Change was palpable to all the participants. A wall that had seemed everlasting had fallen, a cold war that had lasted a lifetime was now history. The shifting borders and a revised sense of periodization inspired new views of the past as well as the present, of art as well as nationhood and society. One generation later, the contributions to Artistic Innovations and Cultural Zones show how art history has responded to our newly broadened vision of the artistic heritage of Europe. In this volume, the previously unquestioned practice of labelling artists with a period and a place is challenged at an empirical as well as a fundamental level. Artistic Innovations and Cultural Zones revisits the constellation of questions posed at CIHA 1992 at a moment when European history is again being rewritten. It offers new art-historical insights for our time on what it means to be a European.