Carolin Behrmann

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy)

Perceiving law: early modern normativity and the senses

2019-2020: Spring

Fellow for the Academy project “Law and its Manifestations”

Carolin Behrmann is an art historian focusing on political and legal visualities in early modern culture. She is directing the research project The Nomos of Images at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institute that investigates in multiple normative dimensions to understand how visuality and aesthetic experience actively take part in and shape juridical normativity, involving form, perception, action, and knowledge. 

She has worked as a scientific collaborator at the Department for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2005-2011), has been a pre-doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2008-2009), and a post-doctoral researcher at the KHI in Florence (2011-2014). In 2011 she completed her PhD Tyrant and Martyr. Images and the History of Ideas of the Law around 1600 (DeGruyter 2015) that explores the significance of the imagery of martyrdom in the context of the consolidation of statehood, law, and early globalization.

At the Academy she will be working on a book project addressing multiple aspects of a visual common sense and visual literacy with a focus on the 17th-18th century, that ultimately aims to address current debates around a “common sense” of visual literacy in the digital age.