Christine Goettler - Biography#

Christine Goettler is a historian of art with a particular interest in the intersections between the realms of art, religion, and science in the early modern period. While the major focus of her research has been on northern Europe, she has always been drawn to artworks that travelled across cultural, religious, and aesthetic boundaries and challenged traditional definitions of media and genres. Her current projects span such topics as collecting practices and collection spaces; the visual and spatial imagery of interiority; the interactions between various arts and crafts in early modern Europe, especially Antwerp; and historical aspects of artists’ materials and techniques, especially concerning the diverse uses of wax, papier-mâché, precious metals, and ivory.

Until 2018, she was Professor and Head of the Department of Early Modern Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern with which she remains associated as Professor Emerita. Prior to her appointment at the University of Bern, she was Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Washington, Seattle, and also held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Zürich, the FU Berlin, and the Warburg Institute, London.

She is currently completing two books: a co-authored book (with Sven Dupré) entitled “Reading the Inventory: The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632) in Antwerp,” and monograph entitled “Salt, Silver, and the Sea: Peter Paul Rubens and the Global World of Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp.” The monograph brings together the histories and historiographies of craftsmanship, connoisseurship, collecting, and trade, and situates the history of Antwerp’s material cultures in a context that takes into account their interactions with global narratives and processes.

Institutional webpage
Personal webpage|https://christinegoettler.ch\\ \\