Hans Belting

Professor Hans Belting is a historian of Medieval and early modern European art, as well as contemporary art and theory. From 1970-80, he was Professor of Art History at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1980-93, Professor of Art History at the University of Munich, occupying the chair formerly held by Heinrich Wolfflin and Hans Sedlmayr. In 1993 he left Munich to build a Ph.D. program called Kunstwissenschaft and Medientheorie at the newly founded School for New Media (Hochschule fuer Gestaltung) at Karlsruhe which cooperates with the Center for Art and Media Technologies (ZKM) in the same city. In October 2000, he initiated a research programme entitled "Bildanthropologie. Image-Media-Body. In November 2002, he retired from the Hochschule fur Gestaltung but continued activities as a speaker in the program for another year. In 2002-03, he held the European Chair at the College de France. Hans Belting has contributed significantly to a fundamental revision of art history's methods and concept of itself as a field. He has paved the way for interdisciplinary image studies and articulated the relevance of image studies issues in cultural studies and more recently in the natural sciences. His prominence in the field is due to his innovative approach that calls for interdisciplinary research networks between art historians, media studies scholars, and image studies scholars. His current work looks at, on the one hand, the roots of image studies in European cultural history and on the other, the problems associated with new imaging techniques and scientific images. In his book Florence and Baghdad, Belting examines the use of perspective in Renaissance paintings as deriving from a mathematical theory of sight from the Arab world.