The Department of History of Art congratulates Professor Henrike C. Lange on her promotion to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Professor Lange is a scholar of Italian and European medieval and early modern art, architecture, history, visual culture, and literature. She holds a joint appointment with Italian Studies, which reflects her own academic path, including her study of Art History and Italian Language and Literature at the Universität Hamburg and Universität Wien, and doctoral study at Yale University. We are delighted to share this excellent news and look forward to the publication of Lange’s monograph, Giotto’s Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility (Cambridge University Press), and her continuing contributions to our research and teaching in premodern art and architecture and their modern inflections, the historiography of Renaissance and Medieval studies, and wider art historical debates.

Dr. Henrike C. Lange, Assistant Professor in the Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies has won the 2020 Prytanean Faculty Award. Since 1986, The Prytanean Honor Society Alumnae Association awards annually a financial grant to an outstanding woman junior faculty member on the Berkeley campus. Through a competitive process, the winner is chosen for her record as a distinguished teacher, her demonstrated scholarly achievement, and her success as a role model for students at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The Departments of History of Art and Italian Studies are very happy to announce the latest addition to our faculty: Assistant Professor Henrike Christiane Lange, appointed in the field of Renaissance/Early Modern Visual Culture in the Mediterranean World. Henrike earned her Magister Artium at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and received her doctorate at Yale University. In spring 2015 she filed her dissertation entitled “Relief Effects: Giotto’s Triumph.” Following the example of Michael Baxandall, Henrike Lange bravely addresses the major changes at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. She detects a meaningful formal shift that has major implications for questions of matter and illusion, for the framing and staging of the scenes, and for the interaction with the beholder. All of these transformations converge in the specific visual effects of relief. 

Lange sees the relief at the center of Renaissance artistic practice and visual thinking about history, power, and meaning. Her dissertation addresses the most famous frescoes in Western art, Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua, as it plays with the imitation of actual relief sculpture. Probing the ancient Roman roots of Giotto’s project, Henrike ... [show more]