Biography

Jérémie Koering is professor of early modern art history at the University of Fribourg. His fields of study are Renaissance Art, epistemology of art history, and anthropology of images. He has published Le prince en représentation (Actes Sud, 2013), Caravage, juste un détail (INHA, 2018) and Les iconophages. Une histoire de l’ingestion des images (Actes Sud, 2021/Zone Books 2024), for which he was awarded by the Pinault Collection (Pierre Daix Prize 2022). His last book is Enquête sur ‘Les Ménines’ (Actes Sud, 2025 / Zone books forthcoming). He is now working on the publication of two essays: the first on drawing as epistemic tool in art history, the second on the metaphors of the artistic process in italian renaissance art.
 

Project Summary

Since the academic establishment of art history in 19th century, art historians have drawn in order to study, classify, analyse, and interpret the works of art they examine. However, while most of these art historians learned to draw and even distinguished themselves through their skill, a few, perhaps less agile or comfortable with the practice, preferred to rely on the talent of established artists to translate what they visualized in their minds into images. This is the case for example of Aby Warburg who often delegated the graphic part of his research to his wife Mary Hertz. The question then arises: how does the visualization of ideas migrate from one person to another? Can we discern protocols for transmitting instructions intended to be seen through drawing? What constitutes the instrument in this mediated use of drawing: the person, the mind, or the hand? What determines the instrumental dimension of the tool when it is delegated? And more simply, does drawing by proxy retain its epistemic properties? This research aims to address these various questions by examining the specific case of the graphic collaboration between Edgar Wind and the architect Karl Schneider for the study that Wind conducted between 1942 and 1944 on the funerary monuments conceived by Michelangelo for the Medici in Florence.