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 permeable three-country triangle-Roman town of Andernach, was exactly what Warburg liked, and a lifelong lustful border-crosser Agent Provocateur on behalf of the picture and its always retrospective influence on its creator.
He was therefore not only known and admired in many different disciplines; an astonishingly wide audience has remained well-informed for decades through his consistently sensational specialist publications, as well as through his great penchant for image-packed film and here in particular the at times intensive occupation with the director Peter Greenaway, as well as through his projects at the Karlsruhe Center for Art, founded in 1989 and Media Technology (ZKM), which he had significantly shaped with others and which quickly became 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. And of course Belting’s opus magnum “Image and Cult”.
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, before becoming a professor in Heidelberg (later also guest professor at the “Vatican of Art History”, the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome) and during the turbulent years from 1970 to 1980 sharpened his methodology there to such an extent that it also helped to deal with the ever-present problem of the image-text relationship , as exemplified in the anthology published jointly with Dieter Blume and still worth reading and “Painting and Urban Culture in the Dante Period” or in “Jan van Eyck as Narrator” written with Dagmar Eichberger, thinking further about Panofsky’s source work.
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.