Project Head

Prof. Dr. Klaus Krüger

Research Fellows

Dr. Alberto Saviello

Dr. Christine Ungruh

Project Description

This project studies, in an alternation of Christian and non-Christian perspectives, the aesthetically determined approach to what is sacred to the respective foreign culture as well as the discourses that influenced how it was perceived, appraised, and conceptualized in the pre-modern era. The diverse forms in which the religious Other was manifested in this process testify to the fact that these discourses occurred not only with a mutual polarization as either demarcation or appropriation, but also at the same time as a redefinition and rereading of their own notion of the sacred. The subprojects focus, on the one hand, on the adaptation of early Christian or Byzantine forms and subject matter in the depictions of the Thebaid found in Italy from the late 13th century onward and, on the other hand, on the processes of negotiation around and with Christian images in the Catholic mission in India in the 16th and 17th centuries. Both seek to show by means of case-oriented studies how the sacred of the Other was transferred to an artistic dispositif whose expressive power was not limited to topoi of in- and exclusion, but instead made it possible to grasp the aesthetic dramatization of the Other as way of lending an aura to or revitalizing the charismatic efficacy of images. At the same time, they explore the question of the extent to which such methods of a genuine resemanticization by means of aestheticizing already contained a crucial ferment for the sacralization of the aesthetic that has emerged since the Renaissance as an increasing divinization of the artistically beautiful.

Whereas art history thus far has usually concentrated on defining and cataloging visual qualities of alterity, this project pointedly asks about the aesthetic valence and effect of the Other within an artistic dispositif. The term ‘charisma’ in the project’s title is intended to capture how the Other could be activated aesthetically in one’s own culture and also how the social and religious validity of the Other could be conveyed in this way. Introduced by Max Weber to the social sciences as a way to characterize forms of rule, the term ‘charisma’ gained new relevance in the 1990s as an interpretive tool in studies of politics, economics, and religion. Transferring the term to processes that can be described art historically is intended to capture the dual valence of the Other in one’s own culture. On the one hand, it directs attention to the question of the extent to which the adaptation and transformation of the religious Other should be understood as a process of power politics. On the other hand, it is intended as a way to study artistic reactions to the Other as a process of sublimation that lends an aura to otherness and turns it into an object of aesthetic perception.