Senior Scholar

Within the broader research area of Italian art history in a global perspective, Senior Scholar Susanne Kubersky-Piredda is particularly interested in the social contexts from which early modern art emerged and how it functioned within them. Over the past years she has been working on dynamics of cohabitation, interaction, and (self-)representation among foreigners in shared urban spaces. Italian cities like Rome and Naples were melting pots that drew foreigners from all over Europe. The project focuses on the movement of people, objects, and ideas across cultural and territorial borders and the role of art and material culture as a means of expressing manifold and constantly shifting collective identities.

The team, which includes a group of PhD students with external funding is working on comparative case studies of urban neighborhoods characterized by a particularly strong presence of foreigners, such as the areas around Piazza Navona or Via Giulia in Rome and the port district in Naples.

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda’s research interests include pre-modern concepts of nationhood. In addition to territorial and linguistic criteria, shared memories, traditions, rituals, and identification figures fostered a feeling of belonging among foreigners. To what extent art also played a role in this process is a central question that the research project is devoted to exploring not only painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also the broader spectrum of artistic production, including prints, objects of daily use, and the vast world of ephemera for religious festivals and processions. The objective is to detect the unifying elements of the individual foreign communities and to show how these elements – for instance, language, religion, values, and customs – found expression in the visual culture and how a sense of belonging to a specific cultural group could arise through the use of recognizable semantic formulae. The study also seeks to verify to what degree art commissioned by foreigners resident in Rome was either the product of ‘self’ presentation as an attempt to distinguish this ‘self’ from the ‘other’, or the product of and cross-fertilization between imported artistic phenomena and local working procedures consolidated over the course of centuries.