1. Hans Belting was a German art historian and media theorist with a focus on image science, and this with regard to contemporary art and to the Italian art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
15 Facts About Hans Belting
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Hans Belting studied at the universities of Mainz and Rome, and took his doctorate in art history at the University of Mainz.
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Hans Belting taught as a professor of art history at the University of Hamburg in 1966, then at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1980 to 1992 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat at Munich.
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From 1992 until his retirement in 2002, Hans Belting was professor at the Institute for Art History and Media Theory at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe.
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From October 2004 until the end of September 2007, Hans Belting served as Director of the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna.
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Hans Belting died in Berlin on 10 January 2023, at age 87.
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Hans Belting was known for his contributions to the field of Bildwissenschaft.
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Hans Belting examined images used in religious contexts to identify the original non-artistic functions of images today considered art objects, and argued that "art" was a unit of analysis had emerged in the 16th century that obstructed corporeal engagements with images.
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In Likeness and Presence, Hans Belting argued for the necessity of understanding the ways images give meaning to their contexts, rather than gaining meaning from their contexts, to understand images as actors with their own agency.
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Hans Belting argued that art history as a disciplinary formation was outmoded and potentially obsolete, and that a Bildwissenschaft capable of apprehending all kinds of images, the exact scope and methods of which remain uncertain, should be sought.
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Hans Belting was a member of scientific academies in Germany and the US, including the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and honorary member of the Leibniz-Zentrum fur Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin.
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Hans Belting was a member of the Order Pour le Merite for Sciences and Arts and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna.
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Hans Belting was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005.
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Hans Belting held a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University in Washington, DC.
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In 2016 Hans Belting donated his private library in three parts to the libraries of the institutes of art history at Free University of Berlin, at Danube University Krems as well as the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University.