As a fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek I am working on two projects:
The first is a book project based on my doctoral thesis. This book approaches the 33-volume Thesaurus Picturarum, or “treasury of images”, compiled by the Heidelberg courtier and Calvinist church councilor Marcus zum Lamm between 1564–1606. Combining life writing with encyclopedic visual and textual information about the world, I interpret Lamm’s Thesaurus Picturarum as a “visual ego-document” which testifies to the underestimated importance of image networks and material culture at the Palatine court in Calvinist Heidelberg.
The second is a nascent project exploring networks of cultural exchange and the international movement of art lovers at German courts, c. 1550–1650. I focus on the Bavarian court at Munich in comparison with the dukes of Württemberg in Stuttgart and the Saxon electors in Dresden. I do so in order to prove my central hypothesis that the culture of ‘art loving’, collections of art and nature, cultural production, and exchange were effectively mobilized and manipulated as a means of connecting across deepening confessional and political divides over the decades around 1600.