Aby Warburg, doyen of modern cultural studies, once ridiculed the obstructively narrow demarcation lines between the disciplines as “aesthetic border police”.

The art historian Hans Belting, born in 1935 in the small, permeable Roman town of Andernach, was exactly what Warburg

liked

.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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This is another reason why he was not only known and admired in many different disciplines;

and an astonishingly wide audience remained well-informed for decades about his consistently sensational specialist publications as well as about his great penchant for the image-rich film and here in particular the at times intensive occupation with the director Peter Greenaway and also about his projects in the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM), which he launched with others and quickly turned into a globally respected innovation laboratory.

In the reference libraries of contemporary artists in the United States, as in the Old World, one will almost always find two books: David Sylvester's Conversations with Francis Bacon.

From the beginning and his education, however, he was a man of the Middle Ages.

He did his doctorate in this field in Mainz in 1959 ("The Basilica dei SS. Martiri in Cimitile and its early medieval fresco cycle" with pictures over painted cloths, a so-called base velum, which he fearlessly dated a hundred years later than all researchers before him), and he completed his habilitation "Studies on Beneventan painting" (i.e. painting of southern Italy from the Lombard era), was then a Harvard fellow at the American Byzantine Studies Research Center Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, became a lecturer in Hamburg, where he set up the department for Byzantine art, which is still outstanding today, before he became a professor in Heidelberg (later also guest professor of the "Vatican of Art History",

Belting never left this area of ​​Byzantine and Western art, a broad “Middle Ages” that reached deep into modern times;

his work on Hieronymus Bosch's “Garden of Earthly Delights” bears witness to this, as does his attempt to reverse perspective in “Florence and Baghdad.

A west-eastern history of the gaze” and all preoccupation with moderns such as Beckmann, Duchamp, Struth, Sugimoto and Wall, which are ultimately rooted in the fluid transitional zone of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Not to be forgotten among the dozens of Belting's books, however, is an early article that poses a heretical question that would be explored in his subsequent publications: In the few pages of text from "Art or Object-Style?"

he argues about categories of a distinction between artistically decorated everyday and cult objects and possible "autonomous" works of art in the Middle Ages.