Henrike Christiane Lange holds a joint appointment in UC Berkeley’s Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies. She specializes in Italian and European medieval and early modern art, architecture, history, visual culture, and literature in relation to the Mediterranean. She has a second area of expertise in nineteenth and twentieth century historiography, literature, and art in Europe and the United States. Her scholarship focuses on questions of perspective, narrative, medium, materiality, and spirituality in specific historical contexts. Lange is currently working on a monograph on Giotto’s Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) and the Roman Jubilee of 1300.
After studying art history and Romance studies (Italian language and literature, linguistics) in Hamburg and Vienna (2000-2008), Henrike Lange moved to the United States to conduct her graduate work in art history at Yale University (2009-2015) and joined Berkeley’s faculty in 2015 as Assistant Professor in the Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies. Lange’s German Magister thesis Pisanello’s Perspective: Space and Narrative in his Mural Paintings deals with questions of visual narrative, with alternatives to one-point central perspective, and with the spatial involvement of the spectator in painted interiors. Her extensive studies of the Quattrocento in Northern Italy, Florence, and Rome contributed to her qualifying thesis at Yale, Botticelli in Rome: The Sistine Chapel Frescoes and the Meaning of Monumentality. Lange’s doctoral dissertation on Giotto’s Cappella degli Scrovegni, Relief Effects: Giotto’s Triumph, offers a new theory on Padua’s chapel at the Arena in relation to a set of specific ancient Roman sculptural sources in an Augustinian theological frame of reference. Her dissertation furthermore engages with the Giotto-Dante problem, the Assisi problem, and modern literary and artistic responses to Giotto.
Professor Lange’s museum experience includes curatorial and pedagogical projects in Europe, such as for the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (2002, 2003) with a focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections. In the US, Lange conducted curatorial internship work at the Yale University Art Gallery (2011/12, 2013/14, and 2014/15) with a focus on the early Italian collection. Her work on the nineteenth century crystallized during her time as coordinator of the Yale Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture Colloquium in 2011 and 2012. This additional area of expertise allowed Lange also to work closely with Yale’s Center for British Art in the context of research assistantships, teaching and travel fellowships, teaching with the collection, and through her work on John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Frederic Leighton in relation to the Italian Renaissance.
Research
Professor Lange is the author of book chapters and journal essays on relief effects in Donatello and Mantegna, funerary portraiture in the Italian Trecento, Cimabue and the challenge of materiality in Christian art, Giotto, Dante, and relief theory. Lange has published on contemporary American and European sculpture and photography. She collaborated on the critical edition of François Lemée’s Traité des Statuës, Paris 1688 (eds. Diane H. Bodart and Hendrik Ziegler; 2012), and is the author of five articles on ancient Roman and early modern statuary, political iconography, architecture, and urban design.
In recent years, Lange’s art historical research has focused on Giotto, Donatello, Mantegna, and the history and theory of relief sculpture. Other projects include Botticelli’s Dante, the Italian Mediterranean, global exiles, and a cultural history of triumphs.
Professor Lange has presented her research at international conferences such as the Renaissance Society of America, the College Art Association, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies. She gave invited lectures at the Dante Society of America, at the Medieval Association of the Pacific, the California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies, for the San Francisco Theological Seminary as well as for Berkeley’s Episcopal Chaplaincy, at Stanford, and at leading universities and research institutes in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France.
In 2017, Lange was invited as Young Faculty Speaker at the Fifth Ferrari Symposium for Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of Rochester as one of three young scholars internationally whose research was identified as making a major contribution to the field. Also in 2017, she was the Inaugural Speaker for the new Annual Di Giovanni Dante Lecture Series at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.
Lange is the recipient of a Distinguished Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (2017-2018). Serving also as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame du Lac in 2017 and 2018, she was affiliated and collaborated with numerous departments and programs on campus, including the Departments of Art History, Classics, History, Philosophy, English, Romance Languages and Literatures, German and Russian, the Italian Studies Program, the Program in Dante Studies, the Irish Studies network, the Medieval Institute, the School of Architecture, the Snite Museum of Art, and the ND Global Gateway in Rome. During her year and summer at NDIAS she worked closely with colleagues from the sciences towards a program of science humanities collaborations (interdisciplinary perspectives on total solar eclipses, the mathematics and distance theory of relief optics, and Leonardo da Vinci’s processes of visual thinking and creative discovery).
Henrike Lange’s research has been supported by major fellowships and grants from Yale University, the Renaissance Society of America, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, and UC Berkeley, including an award for Teaching Excellence and a Humanities Research Fellowship. She represented Yale University as speaker for the 2015 IFA/Frick Symposium on the History of Art, presented by The Frick Collection and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.
Teaching and Service at Berkeley
Lange’s art historical practice and teaching are informed by her curatorial background and work experience in German, Italian, American, and British museum collections. She is the founder and curator of the UC Berkeley Paradise Memorial Archive and Historical Slide Library, an image archive that incorporates rare and unique original photographs of lost sites and objects as well as the historical slide collections that Lange inherited from Berkeley’s distinguished medievalist and early modern / Renaissance art historians and architects.
At Berkeley, Professor Lange collaborates with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Hearst Museum, the Bancroft Library of manuscripts and rare books, the Art History/Classics Library, and the Arts + Design Initiative at the Arts Research Center at UCB.
Professor Lange teaches all levels of the degrees in undergraduate and graduate studies for the Department of History of Art (BA, PhD) as well as for the respective undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Department of Italian Studies (BA, MA, PhD). Lange serves on dissertation committees for both her departments as well as on qualifying exam committees across departments and degrees. She regularly serves as Undergraduate Advisor on the Curriculum Committee for the Department of History of Art and supports board members of The History of Art Undergraduate Association (H.Art). Lange also works with graduate students in the Department of Italian Studies on the integration of music into interdisciplinary research and teaching in the humanities.
Henrike Lange is affiliated with Berkeley’s Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Institute of European Studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion at UC Berkeley.
Creative work done by her students for the Italian Renaissance survey is perennially featured in the Arts + Design Initiative’s showcases and has been published in the A+D annual catalogues since her first class at Berkeley (Fall 2015). Additionally, Lange curated “Berkeley Renaissance 2017,” an exhibition of student artwork and final projects at UC Berkeley in Doe Library (December 2016 – February 2018), and continues developing student-directed online exhibitions.
Classes regularly taught
“Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art” (Lecture Course for History of Art and Italian Studies) – Winner of the Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design’s Discovery Grant
“Botticelli: The Making of a Renaissance Artist” (Graduate Seminar for History of Art)
“Trionfi / Triumphs” (Graduate Seminar for Italian Studies)
“Psychologies of Art” (Undergraduate Seminar for History of Art)
“Renaissance Walls & Wall Paintings” (Undergraduate Seminar for History of Art)
“Triumphs: An Anthropology of Literature and Art, from Ancient Rome to the Present Day.” (Undergraduate Seminar for Italian Studies)
“Storia della cultura italiana: La città (History of Italian Culture: The City)” (Undergraduate Seminar for Italian Studies, co-taught with core faculty in Italian Studies exclusively in Italian)