Horst Bredekamp


Horst Bredekamp is a German art historian.

Life

Bredekamp studied art history, archeology, philosophy and sociology in Kiel, Munich, Berlin and Marburg. In 1974 he received his doctorate at the Philipps-Universität Marburg with a thesis on art as a medium of social conflicts, especially the "Bilderkämpfe" of late antiquity to the Hussite revolution. He worked first as a volunteer at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt am Main, from 1976 as assistant in the division of Art History at the University of Hamburg.
In 1982 he was appointed professor of art history at the University of Hamburg, in 1993 he moved to the Humboldt University Berlin. Since 2003 he has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, in 2005 the Gadamer-endowed chair. Bredekamp visited the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, Getty Center, Los Angeles and the Collegium Budapest.
The research foci of Horst Bredekamp are Iconoclastic Fury, sculpture of the Romanesque, art of the Renaissance and Mannerism, political iconography, art and technology, new media. In the course of his move to Berlin, Bredekamp successfully supported the incorporation of the Census research project into the Humboldt University. In 2000 he founded the project "The Technical Image" at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Centre for Cultural Techniques of the Humboldt University Berlin, which developed under his leadership visually critical methods, a theory of pictorial knowledge in the fields of science and technology and medical visualizations. Since 2008 Bredekamp has directed the newly established DFG-Kolleg research group "Picture Act and embodiment" at the Humboldt University Berlin.
Bredekamp is known for his work in the field of Bildwissenschaft, which considered the cognitive functions performed by the image, the question of a stylistic history of scientific imagery, and the role played by visual argumentation during the Scientific Revolution. Focusing primarily on images that fall outside of art proper, such as those used in the works of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the scientists Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei, Bredekamp argues that images inculcate a particular kind of understanding that could not be formed in their absence. Bredekamp criticises the idea, associated with, that Bildwissenschaft might be constructed by amassing the pre-existing insights of various disciplines, arguing that a new science cannot be straightforwardly established through the adding together of existing disciplines. Against Sachs-Hombach's argument that art history is one of many disciplines on which Bildwissenschaft should draw, and Hans Belting's argument that art history is outdated or obsolescent, Bredekamp argues that art history has always contained an incipiently universal orientation and a focus on non-art images.
In June 2012, he successfully supported the funding application of the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary laboratory. at the Humboldt University in the second phase of the German Universities Excellence Initiative.
In the spring of 2015, he was appointed, next to the British museum director Neil MacGregor and the archaeologist Hermann Parzinger, founding director of the future Humboldt Forum in the walls of the reconstructed Berliner Stadtschloss.
In 2007 appeared Horst Bredekamp's in German newspapers much celebrated monograph "Galilei der Künstler" which was based on a sensational discovery of an edition of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius including unknown Galileo attributed ink drawings. After a thorough inspection including material technical studies this issue was found to be genuine by Horst Bredekamp et al. In 2012, the historian Nick Wilding discovered, that this proved copy was a complete forgery which had been brought by the Italian antiquarian Marino Massimo De Caro in the U.S. antique trade.
Bredekamp is a member of the board of the Schering Foundation and member of Foundation for Sports History Museums.

Publications

Monographs:
As editor: