Jasmin Mersmann

Kunstuniversität Linz (Austria); Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)

Fiendish attacks: the devil as iconoclast and victim of defacing

2023–2024: Spring

Jasmin Mersmann is an art historian with a focus on Italian art and culture in the early modern period. She is professor at the University of Arts in Linz/Austria and head of the research project “unBinding Bodies” at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik Berlin. Previously she taught at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-University. In 2022, she was a research fellow at the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, in 2015/16 at the IKKM in Weimar, in 2014/15 at the IFK in Vienna. In 2012, she completed her PhD on Lodovico Cigoli and conflicting concepts of truth in early modern times (Lodovico Cigoli. Formen der Wahrheit um 1600, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016). She studied art history, philosophy, and history in Freiburg, Paris, and Berlin, and holds MA degrees from Humboldt University and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Her research focuses on the intersection of art history and cultural history. Currently, she is finishing a book on early modern demonology and the motif of the devil’s pact. At the Academy, she will be working on iconoclastic attacks alleged to have been inspired by demons.