The Inheritance of Looting: Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums

SNF Research Project, 2023-2026

https://looting.ch

This research project considers how and why looted objects become defined as “art.” Taking the Bern Historical Museum (BHM) as a starting point—a collection whose core is a group of objects plundered by the Bernese and/or the Old Swiss Confederacy in the late Middle Ages—we will investigate how these works were valued, interpreted, and displayed through time. How did looted fragments come to be understood as cornerstones of cultural heritage, and why did triumphal displays evolve into museum galleries? In tracing these developments, it is our goal to uncover the longevity of Western collections’ attempts to use “art” as a means of suppressing or recasting entanglements with war and violence. In order to tell these manifold and often contradictory narratives, our team is developing a virtual exhibition geared towards both researchers and the broader public.

Trophies to Museums

Significant holdings of the historical collection of the Bern Historical Museum come from expropriations in the context of political conquest and religious reform: the so-called Burgunderbeute (“Burgundian Booty”) looted by the Swiss army after defeating Charles the Bold in the Battles of Grandson and Murten (1476), and the church treasuries of Königsfelden (1415/1528) and Lausanne (1536) taken by the Bernese during the Reformation.

While the intent behind such acts and the role of looting in political and confessional negotiations have often been studied, the status of these objects after being taken has not. Similarly, many museums in Bern and across Europe trace their origins to medieval martial contexts but seldom reflect on how those events ultimately produced what today they define as cultural heritage. Our research project takes a longue durée perspective from the Middle Ages to the present in order to analyze how these works were interpreted, reframed, and (mis)appropriated through time. Such an approach, we believe, will help us to address the longevity and institutionalization of Western theories of hegemony embodied by museums that too often define their holdings as “treasures” and “keystones” rather than ambiguous and fraught.

Virtual Exhibition and Publications

Telling histories of looting and display also requires addressing things which no longer exist: original contexts, loss and destruction, archival evidence of object whereabouts, and dismounted installations. By conceptualizing our exhibition as virtual rather than physical, our aim is to explore the potential of cross-media formats in visualizing the (re)presentation of extant objects and documentation as well as gaps.

Our interdisciplinary team consists of eleven researchers and experts in the fields of Art History, History, Museum Studies, Digital Humanities, Design Research, and Sociology, among others. Running parallel to and in synergy with the examination of the art historical record is the digital team’s research into possible user groups; interviews and prototype testing will ensure that the virtual exhibition will allow for an array of informative and accessible narratives.

The main achievement of our collaboration will be a virtual exhibition going live in 2026. Our project team will also produce an array of texts in print: a series of peer-reviewed articles; a set of four booklets diving deeper into specific objects and intended for museum-goers and the general public; a handbook that will summarize the results of the virtual exhibition’s digital mediation format and reflect critically on the state of virtual exhibitions today.

The horizon is the line that seems to separate earth from sky, the line that divides all visible categories into two categories: those that intersect the earth’s surface and those that do not. The horizon is key to the experience of space; it defines our perspective on the visible world. The Global Horizons project will investigate the historical meanings and functions of the horizon in visual and intellectual cultures of the pre-modern world on a global scale. Examining how pre-modern cultures conceived of the horizon opens a crucial line of inquiry into understanding the many different ways in which humans have conceived of the relationship between an invisible cosmos and the visible world.

Non-western art history is rarely taught at European institutions although countless important works of non-Western art are kept in museum collections all across Europe. Including non-western concepts of pictorial space is key to the project, however, for eurocentric models of art history have generally privileged the rise of the linear perspective. This framing has limited our understanding of the horizon’s complex rhetorical, visual and epistemological roles.

The project’s specific question connects a variety of objects and epistemological categories, such as panel painting, manuscript illumination, profane und religious objects, cartography, travel accounts, and cosmological treaties. Accordingly, the methodological approaches will range from art history and visual studies to cultural anthropology. Team members will also draw upon interdisciplinary expertise, such as technologies of art production, history of science and philosophy. The project thus makes an important contribution to global art history, a highly innovative area in which only very few pre-modern topics have been addressed. It is the ultimate goal of Global Horizons to suggest a new history of representation in western medieval art.