Research Unit
Art History
The research unit’s work focuses on the art history of the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states within their international context, primarily from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Art in all its forms is recorded, analysed and contextualised using a variety of methodological approaches and with digital and computational support. All of the research unit’s projects are strongly source-based endeavours that challenge common master narratives and fill gaps in our knowledge by focusing on artworks, creators and audiences that have received little or no attention from research to date.
The unit’s main areas of focus concern the architecture of the long nineteenth century in Central Europe, Austrian stained glass (the Corpus Vitrearum project), digital and computational art history and Pietas Austriaca, the question of Austrian piety and visual media in the early modern period.
In addition, the research unit houses the bequest of Prof. Bernhard Kerber (1938–2021) on Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). Due to illness, Prof. Kerber was unable to complete the revision of his monograph on Pozzo, originally published in 1971, prior to his passing. The extensive materials he had collected for this purpose were handed over to the Art History Research Unit for safekeeping via Herbert Karner, the former head of the unit.
The Art History Research Unit was originally established in 1979 as “Commission for Art History” within the Austrian Academy of Sciences and became a hub for art historical research in Austria. At the end of 2012, the commission was dissolved. The unit subsequently became the “Institute for Art and Music History Research (IKM)”, which also absorbed the former “Commission for Music Research”. In 2019, the IKM was dissolved. While the music historians became part of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH), founded in 2015, the art historians joined the “Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (IHB)”, whose work is similar in its content and methodology.
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