ERC Project: Archiater

ERC ARCHIATER

Heritage of Disease: The Art and Architectures of Early Modern Hospitals in European Cities

ARCHIATER - Heritage of Disease is a five-year project (2024-2029) funded by the European Research Council and based at the LMU, Munich (grant agreement No. 10109/906).

 

 

Hier geht es zur Website des Projekts/Click here to go to the project website 

 

The hospital as a house of art: Europe’s material heritage of disease

The outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 had a profound impact on the design of hospitals throughout Europe. The charitable organisations responsible for constructing these hospitals invested a lot of resources in art. However, the reasons behind the significance of art and architecture in hospitals have received little attention. Funded by the European Research Council, the ARCHIATER project aims to investigate the role of artwork in hospitals and explore how visible artifacts can contribute to the well-being of societies facing invisible threats. The project will examine hospital visual cultures, the agencies involved, and the imaginations at play in European cities prior to 1750. It will analyse the spaces, forms, themes, and designs of hospital art and architecture, and reconstruct the transitions and changing values associated with hospital materiality.

Objective

After the Black Death of 1348, hospitals were newly designed to face social disease, further plague’s waves, and new illnesses, e.g. syphilis. Social distancing (like recently with an unknown virus) was the main method to avoid all kinds of contagion. New spatial and safety concepts were developed to care and confine the sick and the poor in structures enhancing the visibility of political or religious agendas. While wars and early globalization contributed to spreading pandemics, charitable bodies exploited their roles to gather capital, which they reinvested in art. Despite an extensive scholarship on hospitals as social institutions, the question of why art and architecture were so vital for hospitals remains open. ARCHIATER tackles this gap, focusing on three objectives:

1) To map hospital visual cultures, agencies and imaginations in European cities before 1750 along terrestrial and maritime routes and according to hospital typology and networks.

2) To analyse the spaces, forms, themes and designs of hospital art and architecture as liminal mediators to manage disease and contagion as well as life passages, healing, death, and salvation.

3) To reconstruct transitions and changing values of hospital materiality and develop ways of ‘curating’ the impressive heritage of premodern hospitals.

Bringing together art, architecture, history, and curatorial studies, the project looks at these relations in comparative and interconnected ways. It combines geographical and micro-historical investigations, object-based analysis, and a new conceptual questioning on the ‘liminality’ of hospital art and architecture as mediators between spaces, actors, and intentions in the ‘monumentalization’ of disease, which characterizes historical cityscapes. Addressing these issues will reveal, not only why so many artworks in our museums come from hospital contexts, but also how visible artefacts can contribute to the well-being of a society faced with invisible threats.

 

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Please find further details about the project at CORDIS – EU research results.

 

Kontakt:

 archiater@kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de