Horst Bredekamp (born 29 April 1947, in Kiel) is a German art historian and visual historian.
Life and work
Bredekamp studied art history, archaeology, philosophy and sociology in Kiel, Munich, Berlin and Marburg. In 1974 he received his doctorate at the Philipps-Universität Marburg with a thesis on art as a medium of social conflicts, especially the "Bilderkämpfe" of late antiquity to the Hussite revolution. He worked first as a volunteer at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt am Main, from 1976 as assistant in the division of Art History at the University of Hamburg.
In 1982 he was appointed professor of art history at the University of Hamburg, in 1993 he moved to the Humboldt University Berlin. Since 2003 he has been a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, in 2005 the Gadamer-endowed chair. Bredekamp was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1991), Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (1992), Getty Center, Los Angeles (1995 and 1998) and the Collegium Budapest (1999).
The research foci of Horst Bredekamp are iconoclasm, Romanesque sculpture, art of the Renaissance and mannerism, political iconography, art and technology, new media. In the course of his move to Berlin, Bredekamp supported the incorporation of the Census research project into the Humboldt University. In 2000 he founded the project "The Technical Image" at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Centre for Cultural Techniques (HZK) of the Humboldt University Berlin, which developed under his leadership visually critical methods, a theory of pictorial knowledge in the fields of science and technology and medical visualizations. From 2008 to 2018 Bredekamp was co-founder and director of the DFG-Kolleg research group "Image Act and embodiment" ("Bildakt und Verkörperung") at Humboldt University Berlin.
In 2007, Bredekamp's monograph Galilei der Künstler [Galileo the artists] appeared in German newspapers. This monograph was based on the discovery of an edition of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius including unknown Galileo-attributed ink drawings. After a thorough inspection including material technical studies, Bredekamp and his co-authors declared this newly discovered work to be the genuine work of Galileo. In 2012, historian Nick Wilding discovered that this copy was, in fact, a forgery which had been brought by the Italian antiquarian and convicted criminal Marino Massimo De Caro in the U.S. antique trade.
From 2012 to 2018, together with Wolfgang Schäffner, Bredekamp served as speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung” at the Humboldt University in the second phase of the German Universities Excellence Initiative. The research project operated as an interdisciplinary laboratory that brought together Humanities, Natural and Technical Sciences, as well as Medical and – for the first time in basic research – Design and Architecture.
Subsequently, since 2019, both Bredekamp and Schäffner are Directors of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material”. The cluster investigates the culture of materials in the digital age and is composed of researchers from more than 40 disciplines.
From the spring of 2015 until 2018 he served, next to the British museum director Neil MacGregor (director) and the archaeologist Hermann Parzinger, as one of the three founding director of the future Humboldt Forum in the walls of the reconstructed Berliner Stadtschloss. He emphasizes a collection history that is based on the Cabinet of Curiosities as a world museum, where collections of initially foreign objects act as means for critical self-reflection and offers for understanding ‘the other’. This connection to a decidedly anticolonial tradition of collecting was argued most recently in Bredekamp’s book “Aby Warburg der Indianer” (2019, German).