28 November 2023
Award conferred by Universität Hamburg and the Aby Warburg FoundationArt Historian Valeska von Rosen Receives Martin Warnke Medal
Photo: Private
The Martin Warnke Medal is awarded by the Aby Warburg Foundation and Universität Hamburg to honor the art historian Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke (1937–2019). It is awarded every 3 years for outstanding academic achievements in the field of cultural studies.
The award ceremony will take place on
Monday, 11 December 2023 at 7 pm
in the Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstraße 116, 20249 Hamburg.
Members of the media are welcome to attend.
Hamburg’s deputy mayor, Katharina Fegebank, will open the ceremony in her role as chair of the Aby Warburg Foundation. The University’s vice president Prof. Dr. Natalia Filatkina will give the laudatory speech and present the medal. This will be followed by the recipient’s ceremonial address entitled “Alberti—Dürer—Michelangelo. Künstlerselbstbildnisse vor dem Zeitalter des Subjekts.”
Prof. Dr. Valeska von Rosen, born in Berlin in 1968, has held the chair of art history of the modern period through early modernism at the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf since 2019. She previously taught as a professor of general art history at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (since 2006) and was visiting scholar at the universities of Jena and Potsdam. Research stays led her to the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome), and the International Kolleg Morphomata at the University of Cologne.
She has received funding from the German Research Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, and the Volkswagen Foundation (opus magnum funding, 2021–2023). She is a member of Academia Europaea, London, and the academic board of the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani—Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice.
Valeska von Rosen is working on the contouring of a visual science based on the reconstruction of historically adequate patterns of thought about the arts and their producers and is particularly interested in questions of artistic poiesis, models of thought of the non-normalized, and the specific discursivity of image and text. Currently, von Rosen is researching the genesis of the European artist’s self-portrait and historiographic models of order already developed in the early modern period in contrast to Vasari’s narrative of a linear development of art.
In memory of Martin Warnke, the award ceremony and the ceremonial lecture will take place on 11 December 2023, the fourth anniversary of Warnke’s death. Martin Warnke was born in Brazil in 1937. He studied art history, history, and German studies in Munich, Madrid, and Berlin. He was a professor of art history at Marburg University from 1971 to 1978. Starting in 1979, he taught at Universität Hamburg and was head of the Research Centre for Political Iconography at the Warburg-Haus Hamburg. In 1991, he received the Leibniz Prize and he retired in 2002. Warnke was a member of the Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. In 2006, he received the Gerda Henkel Prize, an international research award of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung; in 2007 he received an honorary doctorate from the TU Dresden, and it 2010 an honorary doctorate from the TU Dortmund. Martin Warnke died on 11 December 2019 in Halle/Saale.