Awards
2004 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Hans Belting
Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship (1988)
This award, established in 2003, celebrates the career of an author of note. “Writing on art” includes art criticism, art history, art biography, and/or art theory, and the award is presented to an author who, among other distinctions, has demonstrated a particular commitment to his or her work throughout a long career and has had an impact, nationally and internationally, on the field. It is with great admiration and pleasure that the committee gives this year’s award to Hans Belting.
In a letter to the committee, one prominent medievalist wrote unequivocally that Belting “is the most influential scholar of medieval art of his generation.” This nominator spoke of Belting’s “fundamental contributions to the history of Byzantine wall painting and manuscript illumination, Carolingian art in Rome and Gaul, Italian trecento mural decoration, and the development of early Flemish panel painting.” Belting’s work shows dexterity in method and depth of research: he used stylistic and iconographic analysis in his monograph on Cimitile, and codicology and patronage studies in his scholarship on late Byzantine manuscript illumination. He employed archival and archaeological methods in his reconstruction of the Lateran audience halls, and anthropology underlies Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (1990). The Times Literary Supplement called Belting’s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1994) simply “one of the most intellectually exciting and historically grounded interpretations of Christian iconography.” Writing about the same text in the New Republic, Arthur C. Danto wrote, “I cannot begin to describe the richness or the imaginative grandeur of Hans Belting’s book.”
Belting’s breadth of subject matter in medieval studies is also impressive. “In Die Bibel des Niketas,” the letter of nomination noted, “he treated the traditional issue of models and innovation during the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’; while in Bild-Anthropologie, he imaginatively considered such unexpected topics as the relationship between medieval coats of arms and portraits.” In 1979, Belting wrote a monograph on the Basilica di San Francesco, one of the most studied monuments in the history of art, offering an integrated perspective on the totality of the church with many fresh insights, including “new ideas about dating, iconography, the use of models, papal politics, the relationship of art and liturgy, the evolving Francis cult, attributions, and the function of the new style.”
Belting would deserve this award if only for his work on the Middle Ages. But he has also written importantly on the Renaissance, modern art, film, photography, and new media. His essays on postmedieval art range from Jacopo Bellini, Hieronymus Bosch, and Jan van Eyck to Max Beckmann and Sigmar Polke. In his more than twenty-five books and ninety articles, he also deals with large questions of art and society. In The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship (1998), he addresses the way in which Germans find national identity through art; in the controversial book on The End of the History of Art? (1987), he writes a genealogy of art history as a discipline, pointing to a methodological end game that has forced a fundamental redefinition. Indeed, Belting’s brilliant and highly original body of writing has encompassed a remarkable range of both subject matter and method, and it has influenced widely the debate about art and art history.
Committee: Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chair; Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Katy Siegel, Hunter College, City University of New York; and Terrie Sultan, University of Houston.
