Project description
The hospital as a house of art: Europe’s material heritage of disease
The outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 had a profound impact on the design of hospitals throughout Europe. The charitable organisations responsible for constructing these hospitals invested a lot of resources in art. However, the reasons behind the significance of art and architecture in hospitals have received little attention. Funded by the European Research Council, the ARCHIATER project aims to investigate the role of artwork in hospitals and explore how visible artifacts can contribute to the well-being of societies facing invisible threats. The project will examine hospital visual cultures, the agencies involved, and the imaginations at play in European cities prior to 1750. It will analyse the spaces, forms, themes, and designs of hospital art and architecture, and reconstruct the transitions and changing values associated with hospital materiality.
Objective
After the Black Death of 1348, hospitals were newly designed to face social disease, further plague’s waves, and new illnesses, e.g. syphilis. Social distancing (like recently with an unknown virus) was the main method to avoid all kinds of contagion. New spatial and safety concepts were developed to care and confine the sick and the poor in structures enhancing the visibility of political or religious agendas. While wars and early globalization contributed to spreading pandemics, charitable bodies exploited their roles to gather capital, which they reinvested in art. Despite an extensive scholarship on hospitals as social institutions, the question of why art and architecture were so vital for hospitals remains open. ARCHIATER tackles this gap, focusing on three objectives: 1) To map hospital visual cultures, agencies and imaginations in European cities before 1750 along terrestrial and maritime routes and according to hospital typology and networks. 2) To analyse the spaces, forms, themes and designs of hospital art and architecture as liminal mediators to manage disease and contagion as well as life passages, healing, death, and salvation. 3) To reconstruct transitions and changing values of hospital materiality and develop ways of ‘curating’ the impressive heritage of premodern hospitals. Bringing together art, architecture, history, and curatorial studies, the project looks at these relations in comparative and interconnected ways. It combines geographical and micro-historical investigations, object-based analysis, and a new conceptual questioning on the ‘liminality’ of hospital art and architecture as mediators between spaces, actors, and intentions in the ‘monumentalization’ of disease, which characterizes historical cityscapes. Addressing these issues will reveal, not only why so many artworks in our museums come from hospital contexts, but also how visible artefacts can contribute to the well-being of a society faced with invisible threats.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
80539 MUNCHEN
Germany
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