Biography

Alexandra Enzensberger works on the history of museum display and art collecting spanning the period from 1800 to the present. She was Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant to the Director at Villa I Tatti in 2016 as well as in 2019 and Executive Assistant to the General Director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin from 2017-2018. During her doctoral studies she received a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and was a visiting student at Harvard in 2015. She curated an exhibition on the Raphael Madonnas in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin on the occasion of the Raphael anniversary 2020 (“Raphael in Berlin. The Madonnas of the Gemäldegalerie”, 13 Dec 2019 - 14 Jun 2020). Her publications include “Das inszenierte Meisterwerk” (Deutscher Kunstverlag/De Gruyter, 2019) and “Apostles in Prussia. The Raphael Tapestries in the Bode Museum” (Sandstein Verlag 2020).

Project Summary

The project Black Mediterranean / Mediterraneo Nero – Artistic Encounters and Counter-narratives / Incontri artistici e contronarrazioni seeks to call the field’s attention to the role played by the African continent in shaping Mediterranean aesthetics during the early modern period. It offers a unique opportunity to revisit concepts of the relationship between the African continent and the Mediterranean and broaden the perspective. As the project advances, it will build a network among regions and scholars and foster cooperation and exchange among art historians and cultural historians. A joint initiative with Avinoam Shalem (Columbia University) and generously sponsored by the Getty Foundation as part of their Connecting Art Histories initiative, this multi-year project consists of Fellowships, Visiting Professorships, Exploratory Seminars, Workshops, and Masterclasses. Mediterraneo Nero aims to establish cooperation with young and promising scholars from Africa and encourage productive relationships with existing African institutions of art and material history.