Introduction
Hans Belting (born 7 July 1935 in Andernach, Rhine Province) is a German art historian and theorist of medieval and Renaissance art, as well as contemporary art and image theory. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and studied at the universities of Mainz and Rome, and took his doctorate in art history at the University of Mainz. Subsequently he has held a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University), Washington, D.C..
Belting taught as a professor at the University of Hamburg in 1966. He taught as a professor of art history at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1980 to 1992 as a professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität at Munich.
From 1992 until his retirement in 2002, Belting was professor at the Institute for Art History and Media Theory at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe. From October 2004 until the end of September 2007, Belting served as Director of the Internationalen Forschungszentrums Kulturwissenschaften (International Research Centre for Cultural Studies) in Vienna.
Belting is a member of various scientific academies in Germany and the U.S., including the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and honorary member of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (since 2006). He is a member of the Order pour le Mérite of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna (MUMOK). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992.
In 2016 Belting donated his private library to Center of Early Medieval Studies of Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University because its students impressed him and he considers this department as one of the best in Europe. Hence the university named the new library after him.
Further parts of his private library were donated to the Freie Universität Berlin as well as the Donau-Universität Krems.
Belting published his first monograph in 1962 (Die Basilica dei Ss. Martiri in Cimitile) and since then has authored more than thirty books, some of them translated into various languages. His essay The End of Art History? attracted considerable attention and Belting expanded it in successive editions.
Works
- Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts, München: C. H. Beck, München. 2013
- Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science2011
- An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body2011
- Looking through Duchamp's Door2010
- Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights 2005
- Art History after Modernism by Hans Belting, Mitch Cohen and Kenneth J. Northcott 2003
- The Invisible Masterpiece 2001
- Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs by Hans Belting and Thomas Struth 2001
- The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship 1998
- Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art 1997
- The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion 1990
- Max Beckmann: Tradition as a Problem in Modern Art1989
- The End of the History of Art?1987