Historic Preservation and the Image of the Middle Ages. Conceptual Paradigms and Image Production in the Context of Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture in Germany and France

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Stephan Albrecht; Professor Dr. Gerhard Vinken
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269856417

The image that we have of medieval sacred architecture is to a large extent coloured by changing conceptual paradigms in the field of historic preservation, which has shaped these buildings according to its vision and understanding of the medieval past. The proposed research project centres on a systematic and comparative investigation of this process of "image production" as it unfolded during the 20th century. With this concentration on the Modern period, the study breaks new ground. Since 1900, with the move away from Historicism and the practice of "creative conservation", the discipline of historic preservation has come to understand itself increasingly as an objective science, one dedicated to studying and preserving artefacts as they exist. This study challenges this understanding by suggesting that the formal goals of 20th-century restorations in fact represent a continuation - albeit in another form, and rarely explicitly or self-consciously - of the practice of shaping the image of the past. As a result, changing and varied images of medieval sacred architecture continue to be produced by the field, despite its overt commitment to a modern doctrine of scientific objectivity.The research project aims at reconstructing the different conceptual paradigms in operation in France and Germany, two countries with comparatively long histories of institutionalized preservation as well as dominant roles in the international preservation discourse during much of the 20th century. In a first step, a sample of monuments from each country will be analyzed with respect to the different restoration campaigns carried out and the processes of image production that these seem to embody. In a second step, the relationship of these restoration practices both to the accepted tenets of historic preservation at the time and to representative modes of popular photography, such as postcards and travel or architectural guidebooks, will be investigated. Finally, a comparison will be undertaken to clarify how and why markedly different images of the Middle Ages were pursued in France and Germany over extended periods during the 20th century.The broad perspective taken by the study will place our knowledge of the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity on a correspondingly broader basis. Moreover, through its consistent and appropriate contextualization of the restoration campaigns within both contemporary theoretical debates and the changing imaginary of popular print media, the project will make an important contribution to intellectual history: in contrast to the prevailing self-conception of historic preservation as an objective science, the discipline will be consistently presented as historically-determined cultural technique. It is an approach that promises to offer new impulses to a field that currently finds itself in conceptual crisis.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants