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What was the role of art in the context of rapidly changing political alliances of the early modern period? The interdisciplinary contributions to this volume explore this question from the perspectives of "War and Peace," "Jesuits and Diplomacy," "Negotiating with Faith," and "Court and Diplomatic Celebrations". Special attention is paid to those art genres that were suitable for easy distribution due to their reproducibility, such as medals and prints. But also paintings, tombs and ephemeral festivities like fireworks served the manifestation of claims to power. The exemplary analyses provide a broad view of the political dimensions of early modern transcultural artistic exchange in Europe and beyond.

Images are not neutral conveyors of messages shipped around the globe to achieve globalized spectatorship. They are powerful forces that elicit very diverse responses and can resist new visual hegemonies of our global world. Bringing together case studies from the field of media, art, politics, religion, anthropology and science, this volume breaks new ground by reflecting on the very power of images beyond their medial exploitation.

The contributions by Hans Belting, Susan Buck-Morss, Georges Didi-Huberman, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Ticio Escobar among others testify that globalization does not necessarily equal homogenization, and that images can open up alternative ways of picturing what is to come.

Venice and Padua are neighboring cities with a topographical and geopolitical distinction. Venice is a port city in the Venetian Lagoon, which opened up towards Byzantium and the East. Padua on the mainland was founded in Roman times and is a university city, a place of Humanism and research into antiquity. The contributions analyze works of art as aesthetic formulations of their places of origin, which however also have an effect on and expand their surroundings. International experts investigate how these two different concepts stimulated each other in the Early Modern Age, and how the exchange worked.

In recent years, the emerging field of museum studies has seen rapid expansion in the critical study of museums and scholars started to question the institution and its functions. To contribute differentiated viewpoints to the currently evolving meta-discourse on the museum, this volume aims to investigate how the institution of the museum has been visualized and translated into different kinds of images and how these images have affected our perception of these institutions.
In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds, including art history, heritage, museums studies and architectural history, explore a broad range of case studies stretching across the globe. The volume opens up debate about the epistemological and historiographical significance of a variety of different images and representations of the Art Museum, including the transformation or adaptation of the image of the art museum across periods and cultures. In this context, this volume aims to develop a new theoretical framework while proposing new methodological tools and resources for the analysis of museological representations on a global scale.

Thousands of people were driven into exile by Germany's National Socialist regime from 1933 onward. For many German-speaking artists and writers Paris became a temporary capital. The archives of these exiles became "displaced objects" - scattered, stolen, confiscated, and often destroyed, but also frequently preserved. This book assesses previously unknown source material stored at the Moscow State Military Archive (RVGA) since the end of the war, and offers new insights into the activities of German-speaking exiles in the 1930s in Paris and Europe. Against the backdrop of current debates surrounding displaced cultural goods and their restitution, this work seeks to facilitate a transnational, interdisciplinary scientific dialogue.

Museum science, museum analysis, museum history, and museum theory – all this expanding terminology underscores the growing scholarly interest in museums. A recurring assertion is that as an institution, the museum has largely functioned as a venue for the formation of specifically national identities. This volume, by contrast, highlights the museum as a product of transnational processes of exchange, focusing on the period from 1750 to 1940.

A Collector’s Odyssey presents a case of agency and moxie in the face of ruthless Nazi persecution and organized plunder. It reconstructs the untold story of wartime refugee Marie-Anne von/de Goldschmidt-Rothschild and ascertains the contents and trajectory of her art collection. Yet it is less about provenance, or transfers of ownership, than about one collector’s resistance to relinquishing ownership. Beginning with the collection’s inception in Berlin and spanning two World Wars, it traces artworks secretly relocated to Paris, haltingly transported to the U.S., exhibited there, repatriated, then quietly dispersed. Her in-laws’ respective cases of despoliation and exile further highlight what Jewish collectors faced in Nazi Germany. This book restores their stories to memory, countering the Reich's intended erasure.

• Reconstructs the untold story of the Jewish-born Baroness Marie-Anne von/de Goldschmidt-Rothschild, with a special focus on the fate of her art collection during the Nazi era
• Tells the saga of a German Jewish family, crushed by systematic persecution and dispossession in the 1930s-1940s
• Reveals the Nazi-era provenance of the (mostly) Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artworks in the collection of Marie-Anne von/de Goldschmidt-Rothschild

Italian art embodies a model of ideal beauty that is deeply rooted in western historical consciousness. In the 1930s, the Italian fascist regime appropriated this model to establish cultural-political relations with other governments. As ambassadors of fascist cultural diplomacy, iconic masterpieces of Italian art then travelled in exhibitions to London, Paris, Belgrade, and the USA.

Matilde Cartolari discusses exhibitions as a point of intersection between art historiography and the art market, restoration and heritage protection, nationalism and internationalism. Her analysis sheds light on the development of Italy's fascist cultural policy from the ephemeral triumphalism of the Ethiopian campaign to the unfulfilled dream of the E42 World’s Fair.